Documentary about German comedian Loriot alias Vicco von Bülow, who would have been 100 years old in 2023.
Today, 80 years after the events and 40 years after the film, these images and testimonies shed an unexpected light on the reality of the fiction filmed by Petersen. The international success of the film Das Boot made the U-96, of which it fictionally recounts the 7th combat patrol at sea, the most famous of all Hitler's submarines and arguably one of the most famous movie submarines. But the true story of this extraordinary submarine and its equally exceptional crew goes far beyond fiction. Knowing that the success of Das Boot not only opened the doors of Hollywood to Wolfgang Petersen, but also made this film an absolute reference from which all submarine warfare films produced by American cinema were subsequently inspired, this opens ultimately the way to a broader reflection on the indirect, even unconscious relationship that exists between the power of the images of Hitler's propaganda and that of today's Hollywood cinema.
In 2020, the author Anatol Regnier published Jeder schreibt für sich allein, a book that examines the life and work of writers in Nazi Germany. In collaboration with Regnier, Dominik Graf, Constantin Lieband, and Felix von Boehm have adapted this book into a polyphonic essay film of the same name – almost three hours in duration – that takes a meticulous look at the contradictory biographies of Hans Fallada, Gottfried Benn, Erich Kästner, Ina Seidel and Will Vesper.
In 1981, a film about the misadventures of a German U-boat crew in 1941 becomes a worldwide hit almost four decades after the end of the World War II. Millions of viewers worldwide make Das Boot the most internationally successful German film of all time. But due to disputes over the script, accidents on the set, and voices accusing the makers of glorifying the war, the project was many times on the verge of being cancelled.
At the beginning of 1979, after more than 30 years of collective repression, a dramatized and emotional US television miniseries ensured that the German population was suddenly reminded of the terrible Nazi crimes against the Jews. What is now expressed with the hitherto unknown word Holocaust, hits many millions of people in the heart. The unexpected echo and the audience reactions were fierce. Even before the TV broadcast neo-Nazis blasted in vain transmitting towers in Germany to prevent this. From the creation and the shooting over the broadcast to the tremendous reactions, documentary filmmaker Alice Agneskirchner tells the story of this emotional television event, which led to a paradigm shift in the perception of German Nazi crimes.
Günter Rohrbach is a German film producer, perhaps most well known for producing the war drama 'Das Boot', fantasy film 'The Neverending Story' and the Loriot comedys 'Ödipussi' and 'Pappa Ante Portas'.