Movies: Bertolt Brecht

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....

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...

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...

Composed in the 1930s by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, this is a mordant satire on capitalism and the inexorable industrialization of a society in which the ultimate crime is not having money...

In London at the turn of the century, underworld kingpin Mack the Knife marries Polly Peachum without the knowledge of her father, the equally enterprising 'king of the beggars'....

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...

In the search for a single good person in the province of Sezuan, three gods finally find only poor street girl Shen Te, whom they reward with a large gift of money. Now wealthy, Shen Te is now so exploited by all men that she has no choice but to sl...

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...

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

Brecht's company of actors tells the story of Bertolt Brecht: his theatre, plays, poetry and his life....

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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....

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....

Baal explores the cult of the genius, an antiheroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality....

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....

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...

A tory based on classical theatre play "Mother Courage and Her Children" by Bertolt Brecht....

An inexplicable showdown between two men and the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city....

Depicts the consumerism of the mythical city of Mahagonny, conveying all its ripe decadence. A Hollywood Babylon full of pyramidal towers, carved elephants, commodified sex and licensed gluttony. An opera in three acts, live from the Salzburger Fest...

Germany 1939. Hans and Lene marry the day before the war breaks out, and Hans is sent to the Eastern front. During a bombing raid their daughter Anna is born. The house is destroyed and Lene and Anna moves in with relatives in Berlin. Hans survives t...