Helke Sander

Helke Sander's In the Midst of the Malestream provides one of the few documentary histories of the German women's movement, from its initial flowerings through its heyday in the late 1960s. Sander exhumed and gathered extant archival footage, much of it recorded on now-obscure formats such as the Japan Standard 1, used equipment to convert it and digitize it, and interpolated it into her film. The film devotes screen time to numerous subtopics relevant to the central subject, including the $218 pro-abortion campaign, the self-perceptions of German men, the battle between the Christian churches of Germany and the feminists, and the child-bearing strike that occurred in complete silence. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

German director Ulrich Köhler made his feature debut with Bungalow. Pro skateboarder Lennie Burmeister stars in his first film role as Paul, a disaffected teen who lets his ennui carry him out of the army. He goes AWOL out of boredom, it seems, and goes to his family's bungalow in the country. There, he runs into an old girlfriend, Kersten (Nicole Glaser), who eventually grows tired of his fecklessness. That's okay with Paul, because his brother, Max (David Striesow), soon arrives with his sexy Danish girlfriend, Lene (Tryne Dyrholm), an actress gunning for a role as an android in a German science fiction film. Between dalliances with Kersten and attempts to avoid the military police who are looking for him, Paul, who has a fairly hostile relationship with Max, decides that he's fallen in love with Lene. He exerts what, for him, seems a great effort to get a few moments alone with her, and tries to persuade her to run off with him. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Filmed and conceived in the divided Berlin of the 1970s, which was Helke Sander's home at the time, Redupers, or The All-Round Reduced Personality tells the story of a single mother and photographer, Edda (played by Sander), against the backdrop of everyday political and economic realities. Edda is a struggling photographer -- her work is seldom rewarding and is consistently stolen by newspapers in West Berlin -- who tries to find a balance between pursuing her career and caring for her young son. In response to these difficulties, she joins a women's photography group that has just received a grant enabling them to photograph West Berlin from a female point of view. While taking comfort in her new group of friends, Edda challenges them, and the government behind the grant, with her photographs that demonstrate the similarities between life in East and West Berlin. Edda's photography leads the group to question the nature of the current political and economic realities in relation to their own lives. The upshot of these images, as well as Sander's film, is that the differences between East and West are not material, social, or cultural. They are rather a product of governments with an ideological interest in maintaining this forced separation. As this questioning unfolds, it causes major rifts between Edda and her new friends and between Edda's commitment to her art and to her son. A unique blend of fiction and documentary techniques serve to create a stark and startling portrait of a city divided in politics but not in spirit. ~ Brian Whitener, All Movie Guide

Felix is a four-headed look at a one-headed male chauvinist. Ulrich Tukur plays Felix, an unreconstructed "love 'em and leave 'em" type who feels persecuted when women demand that he make a commitment. Felix's escapades are depicted in four separate sequences, each handled by a top female writer/director. The four creative spirits behind Felix are Christel Buschmann, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms and Margherita von Trotta. Felix makes no attempt to hide its feminist bias, which only adds to the overall enjoyment of this prickly German comedy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In 1982, director and writer Thomas Mitscherlich decided to make a docudrama on the intense relationship between himself and his famous father, Alexander Mitscherlich, the head of the Sigmund Freud Institute from 1960-1976 and a distinguished psychoanalyst himself. As both confront each other and the camera, viewers become privy to discourses that reveal the father-son relationship and at the same time are entertained by the humor and insights that lighten the material -- as in the fictional scene where Mitscherlich encounters a woman on the train who questions what he is doing to his "parental god." Mitscherlich's recounting of his years spent as a child growing up in an environment of intellectual ferment is similarly lightened in spots. The elder Mitscherlich died while the film was partially completed, so in many ways, it became a eulogy to him as well as to his relationship with his son (who still claims Herbert Marcuse as his real mentor). ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This story handles the movement to end discrimination against women - and its context, through a semi-autobiographical account of the years between 1967 and 1970 that the director Helke Sander spent in West Berlin. The activist Anni (Angelika Rommel) opens an album her son gave her on the political movement called "Ausser Parlamentarische/Opposition," and compares that with her own memory of the end of the 1970s. At the same time, her son acquired another book for himself on a commune that is fighting against the use of atomic energy and for better care of the environment. The book, the album, and Anni's reminiscences mesh to create a multisided picture of the causes that gained adherents during a particular place and time in history. With only $200,000 to make this film, Sander has accomplished a lot given her financial restrictions. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Director Helke Sander plays a female photographer who aspires to become a filmmaker. Unfortunately, she lives in Berlin, a patriarchal society where any independence on the part of a woman is either discouraged or crushed. Sander bitterly demonstrates how manipulative people can function only so long as others are willing to be manipulated. As indicated by the film's title, the so-called "outtakes" contain more truth than the film Sander is trying to complete. Unlike the fictional power brokers in this film, we'd definitely like to see more of the talented Helke Sander. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide