Peter Kern
Birthday: 1949-02-13 Place of Birth: Wien, Austria
Synopsis
Iconoclastic Austrian indie director and former New German Cinema actor Peter Kern isn't just the subject of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's "Kern," but also the low-fi film's strongest creative force. He appeared in more than 70 feature films and directed a further 25. At his peak, Kern worked with the best directors of his era, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Fox and His Friends, The Stationmaster's Wife), Hans-Jurgen Syberberg (Hitler: A Film From Germany) and Wim Wenders (Wrong Move). “When I yell at you, please do not be immediately hurt. If I insult you, take it as proof of love. Remember, I'm Austrian, insane, hysterical, hypocritical and undemocratic.”
Acting
La Paloma
Nightclub singer La Paloma succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby rich admirer and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband's love has cured her, but her efforts to love him begin to fade as she discovers true love with her husband's old school friend.
Terror 2000
Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...
Virgin Machine
A German woman travels to San Francisco to find her mother, but winds up distracted by the sexually flamboyant culture of the city.
The Island of the Bloody Plantation
A women's prison on a tropical island is a hellhole where the inmates are raped, tortured and otherwise abused by the evil commandant and brutal guards. However, one of the guards falls in love with a beautiful inmate, and decides to help her and all the other prisoners escape.
Despair
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.
Wrong Move
Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live. On the train he meets an older man, an athlete in the 1936 Olympics, and his mute teen companion, Mignon. She's an acrobat in market squares for spare change.
Our Hitler: A Film from Germany
This inventive, exhaustive seven-hour film looks at the rise, reign and demise of Adolf Hitler. German director Hans Jürgen Syberberg, who was a child during World War II, doesn't try to recreate history to the letter. Instead, he places his actors -- many of whom play several roles -- on a stage and has them reenact events based on and inspired by Hitler's life. The action combines traditional narration and historical characters, but also idiosyncratic tweaks, like the use of puppets.
