Heiner Müller

Documentary by Thomas Heise filmed in East Berlin in 1987/88.

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson’s ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he confronts a hectic work schedule, funding difficulties and relentless international travel in attempt to complete his preparations. The film examines Wilson’s unique theatrical style during The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which involves the continual creation of evocative stage sets, owing to a unique juxtaposition of movement, sound, text and image. Known for his precise, painterly images Wilson’s work derives more from visual art than the orthodox literary traditions of theatre. As a result, Wilson often challenges actors to perform in a boldly minimalist style, as well as collaborating with non-actors, such as young autistic poet Christopher Knowles in Einstein on the Beach.

From August 1989 to March 1990, Heiner Müller and the Deutsches Theater ensemble develop “Hamlet/Maschine” amid East Germany’s peaceful uprising. Actors help organize the November 4, 1989 Alexanderplatz demonstration. After the wall falls, artists split between a “third way” and reunification.

On the run from her criminal Italian husband, a young French woman meets a German lover in West Berlin who offers her shelter but who also gets entangled in her threatened life ever deeper.

This film not only illuminates Heiner Müller's life and works, it is more about questioning the "Sphinx" of the East and its saying about the loss of utopias and examining whether Heiner Müller's texts, as he himself said, were messages in a bottle for the future or not.

Documentary filmmaker Troller criss-crosses post-reunified “Transgermania” for a year, probing German identity through festivals (Carnival, Oktoberfest), films, small towns and big cities. He attends a Black–Bavarian wedding at an “animal fair,” chats with chimney sweeps, students, artists and elites (from Grass to Müller), and asks uneasy questions about unity, memory and the future - all from his outsider’s lens.

On the one hand, the beyond-Tropicália surreal, wild, ecstatic universe of Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines’ internationally most venerated underground filmmaker. On the other, the Frankfurt School dialectics of Alexander Kluge, self-proclaimed arrière-guard eternal of 1960s modernist moviedom, Gandalf of all essay cinema. For Happy Lamento, Kluge mixed some of his weirder TV skits on electricity, the circus, revolution and early cinema (featuring Fassbinder-regular Peter Berling, theatre genius Heiner Müller, and DaDaism’s last man standing, Helge Schneider, among others) with some of the more outrageous scenes from Khavn’s 2016 Ang Napakaigsing Buhay Ng Alipato. Some 2017 G20 shots of Merkel and Trump et al inject the already heady brew with current affairs urgency.

"The Century of the Theater" - From the "birth of the director" to the "heroes of modernity" - an overview of the world of theater - illuminates the interaction with the history of the past hundred years is also shown.