Directed by Pietro Francisci, best known for his popular Hercules films, Raumkreuzer Hydra – Duell im All is an idiosyncratic science fiction B-movie from the later phase of Italian genre cinema. A group of Earthlings is abducted by aliens and drawn into an interstellar adventure that shifts between spy thriller, space fairy tale, and unintended comedy. A curious cosmos shaped by Cold War anxieties, technological euphoria, and pop-art sensibilities.
The cast — including Roland Lesaffre, Leontine Snell, and Kirk Morris — navigates through theatrical sets and unfamiliar planets, while Nico Fidenco’s score, enriched by choral drama, adds unexpected gravitas. Premiered in 1966, the film went largely unnoticed internationally, but today it is considered a cult fringe artifact of European sci-fi cinema — valued less for its technique than for its style: Technicolor-bright, theatrical, and audacious. A vision of outer space — through the lens of Cinecittà.

A black comedy boiled down to pure metaphysical dread, A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers at their most enigmatic. Set against the quietly buzzing anxieties of 1960s Midwestern suburbia, it’s not a story so much as a spiral: a man, a question, a universe that refuses to answer. Larry Gopnik, a physics professor, seeks meaning while his world collapses with sublime indifference.

This is not the Coens’ most famous film—but it may be their most personal. Born from their own Jewish upbringing in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, the film opens with a cryptic Yiddish folktale and closes with an approaching tornado. In between: rabbis, bar mitzvahs, Jefferson Airplane, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Shot by Roger Deakins in a palette of nicotine and despair, A Serious Man doesn’t explain—it stares back. A cosmic joke with perfect timing.

As a gem of film history, we are proud to present Lotte Reiniger's “The Adventures of Prince Achmed”. Accompanied by live music, this silhouette film from 1926, one of the first feature-length animated films ever made, is a real experience!
In the distant Orient, an evil sorcerer impresses the Caliph with his flying horse. The Caliph is thrilled and wants to buy the horse, but when the sorcerer names his daughter Princess Dinarsade as the price, her brother Prince Achmed intervenes and is promptly blown away by the wind on his flying horse by a trick of the sorcerer.
Between distant lands and spirit worlds, this is the beginning of an odyssey from which he can only find his way back to his family with the help of magic.
With their magnificent colors, the delicate paper cutouts captivate the audience. An absolute must for all fans of animated films and recommended for everyone in these turbulent times, because the escapism of the 1920s has lost none of its appeal.

The patriarchal shine of a 60th birthday darkens into a battlefield of the soul: In Festen (The Celebration), Thomas Vinterberg’s searing debut and the first Dogma 95 film, the ritual of family gathering becomes a crucible in which repressed truths rise and decorum collapses. Set in the genteel countryside of Denmark, the bourgeois family assembles to toast the father – but when son Christian delivers a stunning speech, the festivities unravel into something far more primal.
Shot with handheld camera, natural light, and stripped of music, Festen feels raw, immediate – almost like a confession. The absence of artifice becomes its own form of force: authenticity as moral provocation. Awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998, Festen remains a landmark of European cinema – a film that transforms a banquet table into a courtroom of memory. A toast to the truth: bitter, necessary, and liberating.

It's WoAh Woah season in the Blue Salon! The first part of the legendary book adaptation tells the story of 17-year-old Isabella “Bella” Swan, who has always been different from other girls. When her mother remarries, she moves in with her father Charlie in the small and rainy town of Forks. Her expectations for her new life are low in what she believes will be a boring and strange new environment.
But when she meets the mysterious and handsome Edward Cullen, everything changes. An immediate and strong attraction develops between the two. But something is wrong with Edward. He is different. Too fast. Too strong. And far too mysterious.
Bella enters a new world full of unknown creatures and rules. She must choose between love and safety.

The tranquil village of Folainville is in a state of emergency: the annual village festival is coming up, lanterns are dangling in the summer breeze, the mayor is going crazy, the landlady is wearing Parisian haute couture and postman François (Jacques Tati) is completely thrown off balance.
When the traveling cinema shows a documentary about the ultra-fast American postal service, François decides to transform himself into a turbo version of a mail carrier. From then on, he races through the village on his bicycle. Letters fly, chickens flutter, and even the cows look confused. The attempt to squeeze American speed into French leisureliness naturally ends in wonderfully comical chaos.
Without many words, but with a lot of charm and situational comedy, Jacques Tati, in his first feature film, shows that progress does not always mean progress - and that a letter sometimes arrives better when it is delivered with a smile instead of full speed.

Frank Beyer's Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones) is one of the most important, but also one of the most controversial films produced by DEFA. It tells the story of the headstrong foreman Hannes Balla (Manfred Krug), who uses unconventional methods to manage a large construction site and is at loggerheads with the authorities. The arrival of the young party secretary Kati Klee and the engineer Werner Horrath causes unrest in the well-established structure, not only professionally but also privately. A field of tension arises between the three characters, involving power, morality, and personal responsibility.
Based on the novel of the same name by Erik Neutsch, the film tells not only of the construction of a socialist building project, but above all of the clash of different lifestyles, beliefs, and power structures in the GDR of the 1960s. The film criticizes abuses in everyday life in the GDR and presents a complex, realistic view of life that was too realistic for the party leadership. After only a few screenings, Spur der Steine was banned and disappeared into the archives until 1990. Today, it is considered a milestone of GDR cinema: courageous, multi-layered, and timelessly relevant.

Arnie Cunningham is considered a loser. When he accidentally discovers a sleek 1958 Plymouth Fury that he can't get out of his head, his life begins to take a turn. He buys the car and does everything he can to restore it to its original condition, proudly naming it Christine. When the car is deliberately vandalized one night, Christine comes to life, repairs itself, and takes revenge. No matter how hard you try to destroy it, it keeps coming back to haunt us: the violent return of an icon of US industry in the age of deindustrialization. Anyone who doesn't believe that cars are endowed with power and personality can be convinced otherwise in Christine. Stephen King's novel was published in 1983 and brought to the big screen in the same year: in the best horror film tradition, genre dialectician Carpenter aims to make us fear evil as much as we pity it.

A man crosses a desert, gigantic canyons beside him, his worn snakeskin boots full of holes, his water canister empty. He doesn't know where he comes from, he doesn't know where he's going, he doesn't know if it's just thirst that drives him forward. He collapses in a bar on the border between Mexico and Texas. Here, his estranged brother finds him.

Paris, Texas (1984) tells the story of a man who sets out to find his past. In vivid colors and accompanied by the atmospheric music of Ry Cooder, Wim Wenders' film shows Travis, believed to be dead, on his odyssey through the southwestern United States.
From motels on the edge of civilization to gigantic highways to middle-class life with a view of L.A. - Paris, Texas lets you get to know the USA in all its facets!

The dust has come to stay, you may come by or pass through or whatever

A modest musicologist arrives in San Francisco with nothing but a suitcase full of rocks and a dream of funding his research. A whirlwind named Judy Maxwell crashes into his life and with her, three identical plaid suitcases, each holding a different secret.
What’s Up, Doc? (1972) doesn’t simply pay homage to classic screwball comedies. It lets their spirit loose on the steep hills of San Francisco. Streisand delivers chaos with a wink, O’Neal tries (and fails) to keep his dignity intact, and the city becomes a playground of falling glass, flying luggage, and collapsing pretenses. It's an hour and a half of poised razor-sharp chaos, unfolding like a cartoon and enchanting like a romantic faux pas.
Influenced by Hawks and Capra, but unmistakably informed by the informality of New Hollywood, „What's Up, Doc?“ was one of the best-loved movies of the 1970s. Like a love letter to the past of cinema, it remains comfortably fresh.

Each of Jarmusch's films up to Night on Earth dealt in some way with urban alienation and the possibility of intercultural understanding – a trend that culminates in this episodic film. Five stories, five metropolises, five encounters on one particular night: a taxi ride and the sometimes ludicrous and curious experiences with the drivers and passengers are at the center of the action. It all begins at dusk in Los Angeles, then continues to New York, from there to Paris and Rome, and finally ends in Helsinki at dawn. We have never stumbled through the night more beautifully than in Jim Jarmusch's melancholic and whimsical big-city ballad! With his usual laconic style, the cult director takes a loving look at seemingly trivial things and draws eccentric characters. A gem of American independent cinema, accompanied by Tom Waits' brilliant soundtrack.

Laura Morcillo focuses her observations on Werderplatz, watching as goods change hands for money and the losers of the big system sit around the marketplace, under the suspicious gaze of the marketplace guards.

The film was made in 2010 as part of Thomas Heise's series of observations, which was designed to train the observational eye as an introduction to documentary film studies. It was shot over a longer period of time at the well-known Werderplatz in Karlsruhe's Südstadt district. In 2014, four years later, Laura Morcillo returns to Werderplatz in her short film Lettre de Werderplatz.

In the heart of Europe: an apartment without a door lock. It is the domain of Coz, who now lives in Switzerland after fleeing Turkey. In this portrait, he tells his story. Of being locked up, of being excluded, and of how the doors and locks in his mind have lost their meaning.

“Coz” is the nickname of Yusuf Bayraktar. The filmmaker and his protagonist met many years ago while Bayraktar was studying physics at Istanbul University. Coz was sentenced to 13 years in prison at the time for participating in a peaceful demonstration against Turkish higher education policy. Since 2009, he has been living in Basel on political asylum, where he keeps his head above water with odd jobs and social welfare and dreams a lot. With his film, Büyükcoşkun shows a fate that is not an individual one.

The killer with the Polaroid is on the loose in Karlsruhe. The atmosphere is tense, nerves are on edge. No one trusts anyone here; everyone is a suspect. Only one thing is certain: he will strike again.

Rarely seen in the film archive: action, murder, stolen film music. Samuel Israel captivates in his preliminary diploma with an entertaining mixture of Helge Schneider and Dario Argento. The film is an homage to the Italian giallo films of the 1970s and so fresh that you can almost smell the pub air: a one-man team, half a day of shooting, post-production in the evening, one day before the preliminary diploma deadline. That's roughly how Samuel described it to us. You can see all of this in the film, and we like it very much.

Christmas in 2008: At the cult exhibition “Oh Tannenbaum,” there were Christmas trees galore, but no curatorial committee: Whatever was delivered was exhibited, as long as it was a Christmas tree. Oh, how joyful.

The cult Christmas exhibition has been around since 2004. Originally started as an internal joke, the student project developed over the years into a national art sensation. For one week (the week before Christmas), anyone could exhibit, whether professor, student, or staff member. In 2013, it was over for the Christmas tree. We think it's a pretty cool thing, and it might be worth thinking about again.

Über einem Feld taucht ein Wal auf und spricht zu einem jungen Mann: Bald ist es aus mit der Menschheit und er solle die Botschaft bitte unters Volk bringen. Gut, dass es Youtube gibt! Wenn da nicht die Besserwisser mit besserer Auflösung und besserem Mikro wären und mal wieder alles besser wissen…

Bei diesem Film handelt es sich um Finns Erstlingswerk – er war 20 Jahre alt. Entstanden im 16mm-Seminar von Razvan Radulescu, analog und digital gefilmt, wild gemixt, krasse Grafiken, ein großartiger Alexander Thelen in Bestform und in einer Paraderolle als Youtube-Prediger. Dazu noch Morphing-Effekte, echte Hunde, falsche Wale, ein verpeilter Mitbewohner, Sonnenbrillen, knallharte Action, und ein wenig Gesellschaftskritik. Trash-Kino-Herz was willst du mehr? Daumen hoch!

A loving portrait and intimate diary entry. A gently tentative film about one's own memories, childhood, and the confrontation with death as an unforeseen factor in planning security.

A seminar on diary films by Serpil Turhan deals with an intimate subject and is the beginning of many very personal films by HfG students. Processing potential also unfolds in this example of HfG diary films from 2020 by Rebekka Scheib. We are drawn into a whirlpool of memories, childhood days, insights that life throws at us, or that we throw at ourselves – in remembering.

For those wondering whether the HfG really is an art college, and how you can tell, here is a film that portrays a real art academy, with real dirt, paint, smoking, and everything else that goes with it!

Jonas Rehren, an “Aka” student, spent several years of his studies at the HfG's Design Exile studying film. He returned to the academy for a 16mm course with Răzvan Rădulescu to portray three fellow students at work. In quiet observations, we see how very different materials are processed. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Jonas for his contribution to better cooperation and understanding between the art academies in Karlsruhe.

Brilliant music video for Rainer von Vielen's song Kein Zurück.

A collection of picture puzzles that races past you at high speed – you'd actually have to keep pausing the video to appreciate all the puzzles.

Mascha Dilger’s Ono No Kochami is a cinematic interpretation of the poem of the same name by Clara Sondermann. This contemporary poem explores relationships and family, as well as their transience, and serves as a tribute to the ancient Japanese poetess Ono No Komachi, who lived and worked as a court poet during the Heian period around 830 AD. The film was also created for Stephan Krass’s Poetry Film Seminar.