In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are with English subtitles.

Operation Curveball (Curveball)

WEDNESDAY, April 13, 2022 - 7:00 PM

Germany – 2020 – 108 minutes

Director: Johannes Naber

Cast: Sebastian Blomberg, Dar Salim, Virginia Kull, Michael Wittenborn, Thorsten Merten

Although he already has searched Iraq unsuccessfully for weapons of mass destruction as a member of a UN mission, German bio-weapons expert Arndt Wolf is still obsessed with the idea that Saddam Hussein is hiding something. Nobody around him is interested in this topic any more. This changes abruptly when an Iraqi asylum seeker claims to have been involved in the manufacture of biological weapons. The German Federal Intelligence Service summons Dr. Wolf to ascertain the legitimacy of the claims made by the informant, who has been given the code name “Curveball”. Meanwhile, the 9/11 attacks have shaken the world and put Americans on edge... Johannes Naber shrewdly observes the burgeoning friendship between two unlikely men who find themselves engulfed by the absurd drama they have set in motion. Moreover, as we are warned from the outset, this is – unfortunately – a true story. Naber’s outrage is contagious. Even those previously aware of the facts cannot be anything but dumbstruck as the surreal sequence of events unfold that were to lead to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are with English subtitles.

Exil (Exile)

WEDNESDAY, May 11, 2022 - 7:00 PM

Germany / Belgium / Republic Kosovo – 2020 – 121 minutes

Director: Visar Morina

Cast: Mišel Matičević, Sandra Hüller, Rainer Bock, Thomas Mraz 

First, there’s a dead rat hanging on the door of the house where Xhafer lives with his wife and children. Then the emails he sends are ‘accidentally’ no longer being received. The signs that this pharmaceutical engineer is being bullied and harassed in his workplace are increasing. Even if neither his wife nor his colleagues seem to believe him, this man, who is originally from Kosovo but who has been well integrated for years, feels more and more outcast from his (German) community. Or is he losing touch with reality?
In his second feature-length film, director Visar Morina dissects the psychological effects of social exclusion and presents them here as an interplay between belonging and alienation. Morina combines subtle images that gradually shift according to his protagonist’s state with meticulous performances from his ensemble, to describe the importance of personality when it comes to integrating into another society, and how quickly cracks can develop in the supposedly firm construct that is identity.

In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are with English subtitles.

No hard feelings (Future Drei)

WEDNESDAY, June 8, 2022  - 7:00 PM

Germany – 2020 – 92 minutes, Languages: German, Arabic, and Persian with English subtitles

Director: Faraz Shariat 

Cast: Benjamin Radjaipour, Banafshe Hourmazdi, Eidin Jalali

High-cut trousers, skin-tight t-shirt, short, peroxide-blond hair. On his birthday, Parvis celebrates by stealing a bottle from the bar at the club and dancing. The son of Iranian parents, he has established himself in the attic of his parents’ house in a quiet new housing estate in Lower Saxony and is busy trying out everything and anything from sex dates to raves. After getting caught shoplifting, he is sent to do community service in a refugee shelter where he falls in love with Amon, who has fled Iran with his sister Banafshe Arezu. The trio enjoys a summer of fierce partying till dawn, coloured by the realisation that, in their different ways, none of them is at home in Germany.
In his powerful, semi-biographical debut peppered with pop-cultural references, Faraz Shariat unfolds a tale of intense first love. With a precise grasp of social context, he offers a sensitive insight into the experience of migrants in Germany caught between feeling foreign, being excluded and obtaining the permanent right to stay, and shows how even subsequent generations are still in the process of arriving.

SPECIAL SCREENING of the Portland German Film Festival – Sunday, December 4, 2022, 3:00PM at the Clinton Street Theater

SCHOOL OF MAGICAL ANIMALS (Die Schule der magischen Tiere)    TICKETS

Germany 2021, 89 min. in German with English subtitles

Director Gregor Schnitzler

Cast:  Emilia Maier, Leonard Conrads, Loris Sichrovsky, Nadja Uhl, Justus von Dohnányi, Heiko Pinkowski, Marleen Lohse, and Milan Peschel

The charming live-action adventure with CGI animated animals about an unusual school, where the children receive a magical animal as a companion, centres on the new girl Ida, who goes from being an outsider to the star student thanks to her magical animal, the talking fox Rabbat.

Ida has had to move to another town and is now the “new girl” at the Winterstein School. She has a hard time in the new class: the mean Helene makes sure that Ida has scant chance of making any friends, and there is only one place left for her on the first day of school - next to the outsider Benni. One day, her teacher introduces the children to Mortimer Morrison who travels the world looking for "magical animals". Each of these animals is destined to become a child's soul mate. Of all people, newcomer Ida and outsider Benni are the first in the class to have magical companions! From now on, Benni has the ancient, wise turtle Henrietta at his side and Ida the cunning fox Rabbat. When objects keep disappearing at school, the children and the magical animals have to stick together to solve the mystery of the school thief.