10 Movies Starring Barbara Sukowa

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

Germany, 1968: The priest's daughters Marianna and Juliane both fight for changes in society, like making abortion legal. However their means are totally different: while Juliane's committed as a reporter, her sister joins a terroristic organization. After she's caught by the police and put into isolation jail, Juliane remains as her last connection to the rest of the world. Although she doesn't accept her sister's arguments and her boyfriend Wolfgang doesn't want her to, Juliane keeps on helping her sister. She begins to question the way her sister is treated.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

Ten years after the war, West Germany's market economy is booming. Into an unnamed city that's rife with corruption comes a new building commissioner, Herr von Bohm, committed to progress but also upright. He's smitten by Marie-Louise, a single mother who's his landlady's daughter. Von Bohm does not realize she is also Lola, a singer at a bordello and the mistress of Schuckert, a local builder whose profits depend on von Bohm's projects. When von Bohm discovers Marie-Louise's real vocation and looks closely at Schuckert's work, will this social satire play out as a remake of "Blue Angel," a visit of Chekhov to West Germany, or an update of Jean Renoir's "Rules of the Game"?

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

Wronke Prison, 1916. Social democrat Rosa Luxemburg faces a mock execution. Twenty years earlier, Rosa's political gifts are acknowledged by everyone, as she struggles for democratic government in Germany and revolution in Poland. There she works closely with Leo Jogiches. Their political activity creates some difficulty for their personal relationship... As international tensions rise, Rosa makes speeches denouncing war and militarism. She seems too radical for her fellow Socialists. She meets Karl Liebknecht. When World War I begins, Rosa and Karl are united in opposition...

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

An American of German descent arrives in post-war Germany 1945. His uncle gets him a job on the Zentropa train line as a sleeping car conductor. The American's wish is to be neutral to the ongoing purges of loyalists by the Allied forces and do what he can to help a hurting country, but he finds himself being used by both the Americans and the influential family that owns the railroad. After falling in love with the railroad magnate's daughter, he finds that he can't remain neutral and must make some difficult choices.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

Walter Faber has survived a crash with an airplane. His next trip is by ship. On board this ship he meets the enchanting Sabeth and they have a passionate love affair. Together they travel to her home in Greece, but the rational Faber doesn't know what fate has in mind for him for past doings.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

During the Cultural Revolution in China in the mid-1960s, a French diplomat falls in love with a singer in the Beijing Opera. Interwoven with allusions to the Puccini opera "Madama Butterfly", a story of love and betrayal unfolds.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

When Dorine Douglas' job as proofreader for Constant Consumer Magazine is turned into an at-home position during a downsizing, she doesn't know how to cope, but after accidentally killing one of her co-workers, she discovers that murder can quench the loneliness of her home life, as a macabre office place forms in her basement, populated by dead co-workers.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

Lene, a young student, is standing at the train station. She has to make up her mind whether to take the train back to Berlin (where she lives) or the one to the Bavarian countryside where her family resides (and from where she left in anger many years ago): Finally, she takes the train to her family. Hierankl is the name of a Bavarian "Bergbauernhof", i.e., a solitary farm in the mountains with nothing else around but Alps and cows and nature. When Lene comes home, she meets Lukas, her beloved father, Rosemarie, her rejecting mother, her brother Paul, plus a dark and sinister farm-hand. Lene walks through the places of her childhood, things seem to be just alright for her. They're getting even better when Gètz, a long-missed friend of her father's, arrives by surprise: Lukas 60th birthday is to be celebrated, and Gètz has come back to congratulate, it seems. Lene and Gètz attract each other, despite the significant difference of their age, and they are having a good time. Then, birthday comes. But instead of having a celebration, it turns out to be a family day of reckoning, and more than one well-kept family secret is revealed.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

The life story of the multi-talented German nun Hildegard von Bingen. The film portrays an original woman - best known as a composer and religious visionary - whose grand claims often run counter to the patriarchal world around her. The monks and nuns at the convent become a kind of family, offering both confidants and enemies. For example Jutta, struggling with her jealousy of Hildegard's success, and the young Richardis who worships Hildegard both as an intellectual role model and a mother figure.

Basic Info:

Cast:

Writer:

Fullplot:

In 1961, the noted German-American philosopher, Hanna Arendt, gets to report on the trial of the notorious Nazi war-criminal, Adolf Eichmann. While observing the legal proceedings, the Holocaust survivor concludes that Eichmann was not a simple monster, but an ordinary man who thoughtlessly buried his conscience through his obedience to the Nazi Regime and its ideology. Arendt's expansion of this idea through her resulting New Yorker articles would create the concept of the "Banality of Evil" that she thought even sucked in some Jewish leaders of the era into unwittingly participating in the Holocaust. The result is a bitter public controversy in which Arendt is accused of blaming the Holocaust's victims. Now, that strong willed intellectual is forced to defend her daringly innovative ideas about moral complexity in a struggle that will exact a heavy personal cost.