Movies: Bertolt Brecht

A fearless Antigone, refusing to allow the dishonored body of her murdered brother Polynices to be devoured by vultures and dogs, defies the Thebian tyrant Creon by burying him....

Basing his work on documentary material, Andrew Thorndike tells the life story of Wilhelm Pieck: from young worker to fighter for the German working class, and from enemy of national-socialism to the first president of the German Democratic Republic....

Challenged by a new student, tutor and theorist Galileo co-opts emerging telescope technology and discovers irrefutable proof of the heretical notion that the earth is not the center of the universe. But in a rigid society ruled by an uneasy alliance...

The Gangster Macheath secretly marries the daughter of beggar king Peachum. When Peachum finds out, he instructs the police chief Brown to arrest and hang Macheath. If not, all the beggars of Soho will disturb the upcoming coronation....

Kuhle Wampe takes place in early-1930s Berlin. The film begins with a montage of newspaper headlines describing steadily-rising unemployment figures. This is followed by scenes of a young man looking for work in the city and the family discussing the...

A marginal version of Brecht’s piece, “Baal”....

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, surgeon Dr. Franticek Svoboda, a Czech patriot, assassinates the brutal "Hangman of Europe", Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, and is wounded in the process. In his attempt to escape, he is helped by his...

Harry Smith’s final film; an epic four-screen projection. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. The f...

The rise to underworld eminence of the notorious Chicago gangster Artuto Ui - who bears a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler....

The city of Mahagonny, founded by three criminals, becomes a place for people looking for their luck or money. One among them is the lumberjack Jim Mahoney. However, he is disappointed by what the city is....

An exploration of the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality....

Baal is an amoral poetic genius who, after a life of debauchery, betrayal and violence, is about to cut his ties to the world and meet his doom. A high society party is where the end begins....

"Don't Be Seduced" - Gothenburg's Brecht-ensemble performs songs and texts of Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler....

Baal, a young artist whom society regards as a genius, does not want to be monopolized by the culture and business....

The hardships faced by a woman trying to survive a bloody civil war while caring for the abandoned child of the deposed former ruler....

In the spring of 1974, a camera team from Studio H&S succeeded against the explicit orders of the Junta’s Chancellery, entered into two large concentration camps in the north of the country - Chacabuco and Pisagua - leaving with filmed sequences and ...

A behind-the-scenes look at The Public Theater's production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage" that examines the playwright's life and ideas....

An allegorical documentary about the workers of the world, whose common destinies and hopes for peace are symbolically united by the rivers that run through their respective lands. The film was shot on the Volga, the Mississippi, the Nile, the Yangtz...

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Galileo, an eminent professor and scientist in the 17th century Venetian Republic, is short of money. A prospective student tells him about a novel invention, the telescope, that is being sold in Amsterdam....