Wilfried Zander

Tom Ripley - cool, urbane, wealthy, and murderous - lives in a villa in the Veneto with Luisa, his harpsichord-playing girlfriend. A former business associate from Berlin's underworld pays a call asking Ripley's help in killing a rival. Ripley - ever a student of human nature - initiates a game to turn a mild and innocent local picture framer into a hit man. The artisan, Jonathan Trevanny, who's dying of cancer, has a wife, young son, and little to leave them. If Ripley draws Jonathan into the game, can Ripley maintain control? Does it stop at one killing? What if Ripley develops a conscience?

The story of Ulzana, an Apache chief who has reached a rapprochement with the local Mexican population and generously extends it to whites who travel through the territory. His people have become inured to the treacherous ways of the white man, however, and are now reliant on them for booze, 'relief flour' and beef steak.

A Jewish ghetto in the east of Europe, 1944. By coincidence, Jakob Heym eavesdrops on a German radio broadcast announcing the Soviet Army is making slow by steady progress towards central Europe. In order to keep his companion in misfortune, Mischa, from risking his life for a few potatoes, he tells him what he heard and announces that he is in possession of a radio - in the ghetto a crime punishable by death. It doesn't take long for word of Jakob's secret to spread - suddenly, there is new hope and something to live for - and so Jakob finds himself in the uncomforting position of having to come up with more and more stories.

The naive 18 year old Dobrila leaves her little Serbian village to travel to Hamburg, Germany, where her boyfriend lives. The trip is not easy. Finally in Hamburg she has to realize her boyfriend is not very interested in a relationship. She doesn't tell him she's pregnant and starts on her way home to Serbia, which turns out to be even more exhausting.

In the latter half of the 19th century, gold is discovered in the Black Hills, sacred land of the Lakota people. Gold diggers, profiteers and adventurers flock to the region. Among them is the hard-hearted land speculator Bludgeon, who tries to expel the Lakota using brutal methods. Lakota warriors retaliate, and soon the gold diggers' town becomes a battlefield.

Florida, 1830 - Of all eastern Native American tribes, only the Seminoles have resisted being moved to reservations. Having retreated to Florida, they live a simple horticultural life. But white plantation owners, angry at the increasing numbers of black slaves fleeing to Seminole protection, want to take their land. Plantation owner Raynes, in particular, has convinced the military to wipe out the Seminoles. His rival Moore, a sawmill owner from the North who has a Seminole wife, is against slavery and considers it unprofitable. Chief Osceola sees the coming danger; he tries to avoid provoking the whites, but cannot prevent the war that breaks out in 1835.

This rather unconventional Western movie is set in the middle of the 19th century in Arizona. The film portrays an Indian tribe, the Mimbreno Appacheans, who are celebrating their Thanksgiving, building an irrigation plant, carrying on commerce, and trying to settle down in a rather constricted territory. But the confrontation with the white Americans changes their situation as the mercantile "gentlemen" want to prevent the Indian tribe to become independent from the white men′s business practices. Thus, they destroy the irrigation plant and chase the Indian tribe in an inhospitable territory where they cannot survive. Led by their chief Ulzana, the Appacheans thus start a bitter fight to preserve their habitat.