Movies: Kurt Barthel

After a breakdown, Rita returns to her childhood village in 1961. As she recovers, she remembers the past two years: her love for the chemist Manfred, ten years her senior; how his enthusiasm about his new chemical process turned to bitter disappoint...

Was it an act of sabotage or willful negligence? The non-party engineer Heinz Solter is suddenly arrested and accused of approving a defective pipeline that caused a half million loss to his company. At first, the case seems clear-cut for the state p...

After the death of their father, 18-year-old Helene Raupe (“coccoon”) and her younger sister Asta come under the guardianship of the youth welfare office in East Berlin. Helene fails miserably as a fishmonger, fashion assistant and bus conductor, all...

1936 in a small town near the Czechoslovakian border. Albert and Fritz are close friends. Albert lives with his aunt, who is loyal to the Nazis. His father, an anti-fascist, is in hiding, and Albert only sees him secretly from time to time. His mothe...

Zeitspiele is a playful satire about optimal time management in a company with countless side blows to the socialist planned economy....

North of Neuruppin lies the Ruppiner Schweiz, the smallest “Swiss” area on German soil. Fontane loved the seclusion and enigmatic appeal of this region’s landscape. As an idyllic recreational and holiday region, it attracts countless tourists every y...

Experiments and interviews are used in order to illustrate the special duties of care when raising children with regard to their behavior in road traffic....

Around 1 billion apples are harvested every year in Havelland, one of the largest fruit-growing regions in the GDR. In order to obtain this quantity in good quality, a large number of preparatory and maintenance operations are required. There are al...

With ZUG UM ZUG Barthel creates an amusing as well as bitingly macabre image-sound collage about the negative effects of smoking....

Gathering in Thüringen for their annual rehearsal camp, music students from Frankfurt (Oder) and Zielona Gora celebrate the German-Polish friendship. They soon realize, even though music being the universal language, it takes more to really communica...

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'Traumlos?' sheds light on future plans of three teenagers and young adults in a Brandenburg village. Realized shortly before the fall of the Wall, the film also captures the fears and hopes of young people in the last year of the GDR...

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On the necessity of safety measures on the workplace....