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Werner Schroeter

“Throughout my cinematographic work I seek to explore the elementary forces of love, death and life with the help of various phantasmagorias and utopian visions.”

Photo: Werner Schroeter at the shooting of "Palermo or Wolfsburg"


FR/GER/Portugal 2008, 118 min

Santa María, a city between life and death. Ossorio, the hero of a failed resistance movement, returns to the besieged city looking for his former friends and his lover. But not only the situation has changed, also his friends: While a unscrupulous militia terrorizes the city, everyone is just busy saving their own skin. This night is the last chance to escape.


GER 1980, 170 min

Nicola, a young victim of Sicily’s high rate of unemployment, decides to leave Palermo for Wolfsburg in Germany in search of work but there gets entengled in a fight which ends up deadly.
Along with Fassbinder’s ANGST ESSEN SEELEN AUF (1973), Schroeter’s film becomes one of a handful of films to broach the subject of the difficulties foreigners faced in their attempts to integrate into German society without the support of the family and community structures they had left behind in their home countries.


GER/FR 1996, 125 min

Where does the expressivity of a grand voice come from? What is it that gives us goosebumps? To answer these questions, Werner Schroeter invited the female and male singers he admires most to a french abbey from the 13th century, together with their friends, lovers and kids. There they were asked to bring an aria to life  just as if they told the story of their own life.


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