Friedrich Gnaß

Escape from Sahara (1958)

Three Foreign Legionnaires - Luigi, Pat and Kurt - desert during the Algerian war because they have had enough of the inhumane war machine. But their comrade Robert intercepts them and decides to have them court-martialed. On their way to Algiers, they pic ...

Gejagt bis zum Morgen (1957)

Drama about an impoverished family, a widowed mother and her two sons, trying to get by. ...

Die Schönste (1957)

13-year old Thomas Berndorf, the son of the rich business man Alexander Berndorf, becomes friends with Hannes Wille, whose father works as foreman. They get to know each because Hannes sometimes is allowed to polish Berndorf′s Mercedes 300. They make a b ...

The Track in the Night (1957)

The bricklayer Ulli has received a letter from his girlfriend Sabine asking him to come to her from Berlin as soon as possible. Sabine works as a sales clerk in a small village in the Zittau Mountains near the border with Czechoslovakia. However, when Ulli ...

Der Fackelträger (1957)

Senior public prosecutor Sänger from West Berlin has only one goal in mind: to finally be appointed to the Federal Court of Justice. ...

Katzgraben (1957)

Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1957)

Set during the Thirty Years' War between 1624 and 1636, film tells the story of the sutler Anna Fierling, known as Mother Courage, who tries to make her fortune from the war and loses her three children in the process. ...

Once Is Never (1955)

A musician seeks a peaceful vacation in a Vogtland village but is soon overwhelmed by requests for a symphonic composition and a pop song for a local dance band, leaving him with no time to relax. ...

Wer seine Frau lieb hat (1955)

The Berlin Volkseigene Betrieb (VEB) Komet is planning a company outing. Willi Redlich, member of the party committee, votes like the others: The relatives stay at home. But he doesn't dare tell his wife Susanne. So she does the work of renting the "Waldsc ...

The Beacon (1954)

On a barren and stormy island, fishing families eke out a meager existence on what they can catch during summer, and what washes ashore during winter. But little has been washing ashore of late, and their situation worsens. Elders recall how twenty years a ...

Ernst Thälmann – Son of the Working Class (1954)

This film is the first of a two-part historical and biographical portrait of the communist politician and anti-fascist Ernst Thälmann. In early November 1918, Ernst Thälmann is an unwilling soldier serving on the western front. As the revolutionary move ...

The Story of Little Mook (1953)

An old man living in an oriental city tells the story of his life to a group of kids: He too was once a young boy by the name of Little Muck - much like them, but with better manners and a heap of problems. Having lost his father at early age, little Muck ...

Anna Susanna (1953)

Destinies of Women (1952)

Berlin 1952, seven years after WWII. Four women are looking for a good man and happiness in the divided city. Their destinies are loosely connected through one person: the West Berlin dandy and womanizer, Conny. ...

Schatten über den Inseln (1952)

On the Faroe Islands, people eke out a meagre existence by catching birds. Merchant Brause pays them little and does a good business. This comes under threat when Dr. Sten Horn suspects that the dangerous annual plague, which kills dozens of inhabitants, i ...

The Condemned Village (1952)

East German propaganda film about an American army base trying to take away land from a West German village. ...

Story of a Young Couple (1952)

A young married couple - both of them actors - work in the divided city of Berlin. Agnes, the young woman, is on location in East Berlin, and Jochen, her husband, works at the Westend Theater in West Berlin. This young marriage is in danger of breaking up ...

The Kaiser's Lackey (1951)

Diederich Heßling is scared of everything and everyone. But as he grows up, he comes to realize that he has to offer his services to the powers-that-be if he wants to wield power himself. His life motto now runs: bow to those at the top and tread on those ...

Our Daily Bread (1949)

A story about a family after the Second World War. The petty bourgeois cashier Karl Weber of Berlin observes from a distance how his son Ernst participates in the building of a new socialist society. Karl does not understand Ernst's visions, instead he con ...

The Beaver Coat (1949)

Mother Wolffen, a washerwoman, is a woman of principle: A poor man must do what he must to get through life, only he mustn't get caught doing it. All sorts of crooked deals contribute to the improvement of the daily menu and the increase of household funds ...

Girls in Gingham (1949)

A moving saga focusing on the women in a family that spans three generations and almost 70 years of German history, from the Wilhelmine period through the end of WWII. This film shows that it takes a combination of hard work, political consciousness and fa ...

Sergeant Berry (1938)

Sergeant Hans Albers, the terror of Chicago gangsters, is transferred South of the border to deal with bandidos. ...

Fahrendes Volk (1938)

Fernand has escaped from prison and finds shelter in the traveling circus Barlay, where his former wife Flora works as a predator trainer. Their son, now grown up, Marcel is an art rider and does not know that Fernand is his father. Marcel loves Yvonne, th ...

Kautschuk (1938)

About how the British broke the Brazilian monopoly on natural rubber. The storyline suggests a complex relation between adventure, military conquest and imperialism. ...

Nordlicht (1938)

Capriccio (1938)

Lilian Harvey plays a young heiress in long-ago France named Madelon who is raised by her grandfather as a boy in order to frighten away fortune hunters. But when the old man dies, her guardian Cesaire wants to marry her off to the rich prefect Barberousse ...

Hangmen, Women, and Soldiers (1935)

Nazi propaganda film with Hans Albers starring in a dual role as a daring German airman and a Russian general, two cousins who find themselves facing each other in bitter enmity after the end of World War I. ...

Blood Brothers (1935)

An enhanced and sentimentalized story of love, honor, rivalry, and retreat. The traditional laws of the patriarchal environment and severe conflicts of the heart. The action takes place in Herzegovina and Stolac, Bosnia. The film depicts the Bosnjak from a ...

Love and Alarum (1934)

An Austrian officer falls in love with a Polish girl at a Saint Petersburg New Year's Party in 191, but war soon breaks out. ...

Der Stern von Valencia (1933)

White slave traders kidnap a cabaret singer aboard a ship headed for South America,but they have not counted on her husband aboard a nearby coast guard cutter. ...

Dawn (1933)

Released three days after Adolf Hitler became Reichskanzler, it was the first film to have its screening in Nazi Germany. It became a symbol of the new times touted by the Nazi regime. The title (literally "morning-red") is the German term for the reddish ...

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932)

F.P.1 is a huge airplane landing dock in the Atlantic where pilots making the transatlantic flight can stop. Yet a saboteur tries to sink the technical wonder in this classic German science fiction film from 1932. The film was also created with English and ...

I by Day, You by Night (1932)

A nightclub waiter and a manicurist share the same room, she sleeps there by night and he by day. They've never meet , but they can't stand each other. Then they meet by chance, not knowing who's who and fall in love. ...

Raid in St. Pauli (1932)

Illustrates both the powerlessness of the ordinary worker as well as an intimate portrait of the joys and sorrows of a small group of people in the harbor section of Hamburg. ...

Rasputin, Demon of the Women (1932)

The demonic Rasputin is poisoned but survives to continue seducing in evil ways, in this historical thriller. ...

Comradeship (1931)

At a mine on the shared edge of France and Germany, an underground explosion leads to the entrapment of a group of French miners. In an effort to save the trapped Frenchmen, German miners Wittkopp and Kasper take it upon themselves to traverse a crumbling ...

M (1931)

In this classic German thriller, Hans Beckert, a serial killer who preys on children, becomes the focus of a massive Berlin police manhunt. Beckert's heinous crimes are so repellant and disruptive to city life that he is even targeted by others in the seed ...

Fra Diavolo (1931)

A sympathetic bandit chief supports the cause of freedom in Naples against the Bourbon King Ferdinand. ...