Ziegler Film, Berlin
April 5–30, 2006

Ziegler Film, noted for its theatrical features, documentaries, and television films, is a major production company in Germany. Founded in Berlin as an independent company in 1973 by Regina Ziegler before she was thirty, Ziegler Film has remained a spirited and socially engaged organization throughout its rich quarter-century of production. Regina Ziegler, born in Germany, 1944, graduated from the study of law to production assistant at the adventurous television station SFB (Sender freies Berlin, subsequently reorganized and renamed Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg), where for ten years she learned the mechanics of production. Sparked by her own enthusiasm, vision, and ambition, she established Ziegler Film to help realize commercial films by the radical new generation of young German filmmakers, including Wolf Gremm, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Ulrich Schamoni, and theater director Peter Stein. Ziegler has always stressed the importance of coproductions with other nations, and these collaborations, particularly with Poland, are reflected in the selection of films in this tribute. Also included are television productions, namely the mini-series The Publisher, on the life of media baron Axel Springer, and seven of the short Erotic Tales that Ziegler Film has been making continuously since 1994. Today, Ziegler Film is comanaged by Regina Ziegler and her daughter Tanja Ziegler.

Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Media. Thanks to Ron Holloway, Ziegler Films, and Oliver Mahrdt, the East Coast representative of German Films.

Unkenrufe (Wrozby Kumaka/Call of the Toad). 2005. Poland/Germany. Directed by Robert Glinski. Screenplay by Klaus Richter, Cezary Harasimowicz, Pawelle Huelle, based on the novel by Gunter Grass. A German, once a member of the Hitler Youth, forced to leave Poland’s Gdansk in 1945, and a Polish woman, once a member of the Polish Youth Association, forced the same year to leave Lithuania’s Vilnius, meet in
1989 in Gdansk. He, an art historian, and she, an art restorer, establish the reconciliatory Polish-German Cemetery Society to repatriate the bodies of those born in Gdansk now buried elsewhere. The Society is so successful that it becomes, much to the couple’s chagrin, a victim of market economics. In German and Polish, English subtitles. 104 min.
Wednesday, April 5, 6:15 (introduced by Regina Ziegler); Sunday, April 16, 3:30. T1

Erotic Tales. The Netherlands. Written and directed by Jos Stelling. A trio of wordless comedies: The Waiting Room (1995, 28 min.), The Gas Station (2000, 28 min.), and The Gallery (2003, 27 min.). Program 83 min.
Wednesday, April 5, 8:30. T1; Sunday, April 16, 5:45. T2

Fabian. 1978. West Germany. Directed by Wolf Gremm. Screen-play by Gremm, Hans Borgelt, based on the novel by Erich Kastner. With Hans-Peter Hallwachs, Silvia Janisch, Brigitte Mira. Based on Kastner’s 1931 novel (banned by the Nazis two years later), Fabian is about a young former idealist, living in bordellos and cabarets on the sordid margins of a dispirited Berlin. Gremm provides a persuasive portrait of an artificial and hollow society, painted up but about to rot from within. In German, English subtitles. 117 min.
Thursday, April 6, 6:00. T2; Monday, April 10, 6:00. T1; Sunday, April 23, 4:30. T1

Rodina Means Home. 1991. Germany. Directed by Helga Reidemeister. This documentary portrait of a unique period in Soviet-German relations chronicles the confusion caused by the 1991 departure from Germany (after a quarter-century) of 600,000 military personnel and their return home to cities like Kiev, Moscow, Samarkand, and Novosibirsk. This migration coincided with the aborted August 1991 putsch in Moscow and the subsequent transformation of the Soviet Union into the Commonwealth of Independent States, an event that unnerved the returning soldiers, uncertain to whose government they were returning. In German and Russian, English subtitles. 116 min.
Thursday, April 6, 8:15; Saturday, April 8, 6:15. T2

The Rapoports—Our Three Lives. 2003. Germany/USA. Directed by Sissi Hüetlin and Britta Wauer. With Inge and Mitja Rapoport. In the early 1940s biochemist and socialist Samuel Mitja Rapoport, a German-Jewish refugee living in America, developed a solution to keep blood supplies fresh on the battlefield, and for his efforts won the Presidential Certificate of Merit. He married Inge Sylim, another refugee, in 1944, and by 1950 was denounced in the United States as a Communist. In 1952 he accepted a chair in Biochemistry at Humboldt University in East Berlin. Now in their nineties, Inge and Mitja are highly respected scientists and still very much in love. In German and English, English subtitles. 60 min.
Saturday, April 8, 8:30. T2; Thursday, April 27, 6:15. T1

Ein Jahnr der Ruhenden Sonne (Rok Spokojnego Slonca/A Year of the Quiet Sun). 1984. Poland/West Germany. Directed by Krzysztof Zanussi. Screenplay by Zanussi, Edward Zebrowski. With Maja Komorowska, Scott Wilson, Vadim Glowna. In 1946, in a Polish town recuperating from the war, an American soldier, now part of a war crimes investigative team, and a war widow develop an initially tentative relationship. Zanussi gently and wisely observes the difficulties between two people separated by language and political circumstance. In English and Polish, English subtitles. 106 min.
Sunday, April 9, 2:00; Wednesday, April 12, 8:30. T1

Korczak. 1990. Poland/Germany/Great Britain. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. Screenplay by Agnieszka Holland. With Wojtek Pszoniak, Ewa Dalkowska. A gripping, controversial depiction of the last days of Janusz Korczak, the Polish doctor who created an orphanage for Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi Occupation, establishing within it a just, self-governing society—in haunting counterpoint to the murder and destruction outside its walls. In Polish and German, English subtitles. 112 min.
Sunday, April 9, 4:30; Thursday, April 20, 8:30. T1

4 Erotic Tales: International Miscellany
Vroom, Vrooom, Vroooom. 1994. USA. Written and directed by Melvin van Peebles. 30 min.
Cloud Door. 1994. India. Written and directed by Mani Kaul. 29 min.
The Summer of My Deflowering. 2000. Written and directed by Susan Streitfeld. USA. 28 min.
An Erotic Tale. 2002. Germany. Written and directed by Dito Tsintsadze. 28 min. Program 117 min.
Thursday, April 13, 8:30; Friday, April 21, 6:00. T1

Sommergaeste (Summer Folk). 1975. West Germany. Directed by Peter Stein. Screenplay by Botho Strauss, based on a play by Maxim Gorky. With Edith Clever, Bruno Ganz, Michael Koenig. In the golden summer of 1904 a group of Russian bourgeoisie spend time at the countryside dacha of a couple whose relationship is somewhat frayed. Doctors, lawyers, factory owners, and their wives and husbands allow their domestic dissatisfactions to blind them to the changes that will soon overtake their society. In German, English subtitles. 115 min.
Friday, April 14, 6:00; Monday, April 24, 8:30. T1

Der Verleger (The Publisher). 2001. Germany. Directed by Bernd Bohlich. Written by Bernd Böhlich after a scenario by Paul Hengge and the biography Der Fall Axel Springer by Michael Jürgs with Heiner Lauterbach, Susanna Simon, Sylvester Groth. West Germany’s first media baron, Axel Springer (1912–1985), an early promoter of German reunification and a supporter of Israel, was at once reviled by the left and held in suspicion by the right. This two-part biography vividly examines Springer’s postwar ascent and his later spiritual crisis. In German, English subtitles. 180 min.
Saturday, April 15, 1:30. T2; Friday, April 28, 7:00. T1

Malou. 1981. West Germany/Argentina. Written and directed by Jeanine Meerapfel. With Ingrid Caven, Grischa Huber, Helmut Griem. In her multilayered debut film, Meerapfel, born in Argentina to Jewish refugee parents, relates the story of a Berliner obsessed with the memory of her late mother, Malou, a Jewish woman who lived primarily through the men in her life, and who died a lonely alcoholic in Buenos Aires. In German, English subtitles. 93 min.
Monday, April 17, 6:00; Saturday, April 29, 1:00. T1

Solo fur Klarinette (Solo for Clarinet). 1998. Germany. Directed by Nico Hoffmann. Screenplay by Susanne Schneider, based on the novel I Anna by Elsa Lewin. With Gotz George, Mavie Hoerbiger, Corinna Harfouch. Hoffman, a German graduate of the American Film Institute, transposes a New York crime procedural to contemporary Berlin, making a dark and violent melodrama about a detective who, fleeing his deteriorating marriage, becomes obsessed with a particularly brutal murder investigation. In German, English subtitles. 95 min.
Thursday, April 27, 8:00. T1; Sunday, April 30, 4:30. T2

top