Love is a battlefield: conflict and connection in the German Cinema Collection

From a wartime classic to movie stars in conflict with their reputation, explore the breadth of German cinema with SBS World Movies and SBS On Demand.

(L-R) 3 Days in Quiberon, I'm Your Man, Next Door. Credit: SBS World Movies / SBS On Demand

Lose yourself in German cinema, with a special week on SBS World Movies from Monday 18 September to Friday 22 December, and many more outstanding films in the German Movies Collection at SBS On Demand.

I’m Your Man

Anyone dipping their toes into online dating may be forgiven for thinking that single life is a darn sight preferable to that apocalypse. Which is why this sci-fi-tinged bittersweet rom-com from She Said director Maria Schrader – adapting Emma Braslavsky’s short story with co-writer Jan Schomburg – is so appealing. Maren Eggert picked up the Berlinale Silver Bear for her performance as Alma, a romance-leery cuneiform expert who reluctantly agrees to date an android (dreamy Dan Stevens) specifically designed to increasingly appeal to her sensibilities for three weeks in return for much-needed funds for her Berlin museum. Of course he initially irks her, but this Blade Runner-lite fancy allows for a surprisingly smart, warm-hearted exploration of humanity. Look out for Anatomy of a Fall star Sandra Hüller as a frost rep for the robo-company.

I'm Your Man is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

Toni Erdmann

Hüller takes centre stage in this Oscar and Palme d’Or-nominated eccentric and emotionally unmooring, absurd comedy from writer/director Maren Ade. She casts Hüller as Ines, a Bucharest-based businesswoman who, much like Alma in I’m Your Man, has little patience for downtime. Her estranged dad Winfried (Peter Simonischek) bursts her busy bubble when the joker turns up unannounced with his giant fur suit and whacky fake teeth in tow, to maximum mortifying effect. Sharing some excruciating DNA with The Office, what follows is a sublime reckoning with the bonds of, yes, love, laughter and living that persist past shame and blame.

Toni Erdmann is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

Next Door

Sometime Marvel villain Daniel Brühl marked his directorial debut with this Berlin-set, Golden Bear-nominated celebrity satire co-written with Daniel Kehlmann. He also stars as an unflatteringly exaggerated version of himself, fretting over whether he should cash in by, you guessed it, signing up as a bad guy in an American superhero movie. Nodding to Brühl’s Baron Zemo days and his broader career in a sharp-tongued commentary on self-centred aggrandising, the presence of a cranky neighbour all-too ready to roast him (brilliant Babylon Berlin star Peter Kurth) spins an anti-gentrification rant into a nightmare as class warfare breaks out in this dark comedy that also rolls out the cameo carpet for Phantom Thread star Vicky Krieps.

See Next Door on SBS World Movies, 9.40pm Friday 22 September. The film is also streaming now at SBS On Demand.

3 Days in Quiberon

If you’re intrigued by the idea of films that depict not-quite versions of actors, then check out Marie Bäumer’s uncanny invocation of Romy Schneider in writer/director Emily Atef’s haunting, black-and-white tribute to the mercurial Sissi and La Piscine star, hounded by the tabloids for a series of affairs. Set in a seaside rehab facility in 1981, one year before Schneider’s death in Paris at 43, this chamber piece imagines the details surrounding a fateful final interview with the press while the actor was trying to go sober to repair relations with her 14-year-old son (a terrible real-life tragedy involving him haunts this film). Interrogating how society holds women to different standards, it soars on Schneider’s legacy and Bäumer’s remarkable shoulders.

See 3 Days in Quiberon on SBS World Movies, 9,30pm Tuesday 19 September. The film is also streaming now at SBS On Demand.

No Hard Feelings

No, not the Jennifer Lawrence comedy, but the erotically endearing, semi-autobiographical debut feature from German-Iranian filmmaker Faraz Shariat. He casts a luminous Benny Radjaipour as Parvis, the out-there son of supermarket-owning parents who fled the Iranian Revolution and settled in the small town where, following a spot of shoplifting, he’s been put to community service work as a Farsi translator (he’s not very good at it) at the local refugee detention centre. It’s here that he falls head-over-horny-heels for Amon (Eidin Jalali) while also forming a friendship bond with his sister Banafshe (Banafshe Hourmazdi), who isn’t pushed to the sidelines in this steamy, dance-beat-pounding summer lover story that embraces shifting identity.

No Hard Feelings is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

The Seed

Director Mia Maariel Meyer explores the harsh realities faced by a working-class family pushed to the edges of society in this hard-scrabble story with shades of Ken Loach or the Dardennes that’s co-written by adept star Hanno Koffler (so good in queer film Free Fall). He plays Rainer, who has moved with his wife Nadine (Anna Blomeier) to the outskirts of town on the promise of a never-eventuating promotion on a construction site where he does back-breaking work. But the film’s really centred on his teenaged daughter Doreen (Dora Zygouri), who, in her sudden dislocation, finds common ground with Mara (Lilith Julie Johna) an older girl from a wealthier family who leads her astray, precipitating a spiralling family crisis. A tough but rewarding watch.

The Seed is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

Lore

Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland’s powerful follow-up to debut feature Somersault is a confronting reckoning with the monstrous legacy of the Nazis, as seen through the warped eyes of a teenager. Saskia Rosendahl, the ‘Lore’ of the title, is an acolyte of her SS parents’ fatal fanaticism. Leading her four younger siblings towards safe harbour with their grandmother, Lore’s perilous journey takes them through forests and mountain passes littered with rotting corpses and shadowy characters of indeterminate allegiance in the immediate, earth-shattering aftermath of WWII. On the wrong side of history, she’s an intriguingly unsympathetic protagonist in a disturbingly complex film that offers no easy catharsis.

Lore is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

Westfront 1918

Set on the Western Front during the dying days of the Great War, this stone-cold classic from director Georg Wilhelm Pabst shares common ground with much better-known pacifist treatise All Quiet on the Western Front (remade for TV in 1979 before the recent Netflix adaptation). Pabst started in silent cinema, including the seminal Pandora’s Box, before successfully shifting to the talkies, with Westfront 1918 debuting in 1930. A hauntingly shot, unflinching depiction of the horrors of the trenches, it’s so bone-shudderingly anti-war it was banned when the Nazis rose to power. It’s worth noting, however, that Pabst returned to Germany at the outbreak of WWII and made several movies under the Third Reich, forever tainting his reputation, though he would go on to direct Der Prozess in 1948, a searing indictment of German antisemitism.

Westfront 1918 is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

See the German Cinema Collection on SBS World Movies, with A Piece of Sky (2022) Monday, 18 September at 9.45pm; 3 Days of Quiberon (2018) Tuesday, 19 September at 9.30pm; The Space Between the Lines (2019) Wednesday, 20 September at 9.30pm; Hinterland (2021) Thursday, 21 September at 9.40pm; and Next Door (2021) Friday, 22 September at 9.40pm.

Browse more at SS ON Demand in the German Movies Collection, or the German TV Series Collection.