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Exclusive: Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we can share a clip from Rotterdam title The Investigation, a new screen adaptation of Peter Weiss’s seminal play based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Directed by Rp Kahl, The Investigation will screen this week at International Film Festival Rotterdam. Described as a 240-minute “hybrid project of film, theater, and broadcast elements,” the film draws faithfully from Weiss’s play. Using notes from journalists and his observations during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–1965, Weiss condensed the original judicial statements into a total of 11 chapters, to depict the hell on earth that emerged during the trial. The original play, “Die Ermittlung Oratorio in 11 Cantos”, premiered simultaneously at 14 locations in 1965.

In Kahl’s film, eight stationary cameras capture 28 witnesses, represented by an accurate range of ethnically diverse actors, reporting on the horror experienced and observed in the camp. A further 11 witnesses from the camp’s administration testify in court.

On Oct. 19, 1965, shortly after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial — the first trial of Germans by Germans for the crimes of the Holocaust — playwright Peter Weiss premiered The Investigation. The play drew on the verbatim testimony of SS officers, Nazi functionaries and camp survivors, to reconstruct the genocidal horror in harrowing, undeniable detail.

Eschewing depictions of the camp itself, The Investigation relies on the words of the perpetrators and their victims to lay bare the greatest crime of the 20th century.

On Jan. 27, 2025, 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, the first film adaptation of The Investigation will premiere in Israel. R.P. Kahl’s faithful, four-hour-long re-creation will screen at the Cinematheque Tel Aviv on Monday and at the Cinematheque Jerusalem on Tuesday, Jan. 28.

The Investigation

“Showing the film in Israel, particularly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, is deeply meaningful to us,” says The Investigation producer Alexander van Dülmen.

‘The Seed Of The Sacred Fig’ Among 13 German Films Submitted For International Oscar

German Films has said it has received 13 film submissions for this year’s international Oscar race. Those films include Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes Competition title The Seed Of The Sacred Fig and The Investigation by Rp Kahl. The Seed of the Sacred Fig follows Iman, a judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, who grapples with mistrust and paranoia as nationwide political protests intensify. Rasoulof presented the film in Cannes after fleeing his home country of Iran. He had been handed an eight-year prison sentence by Iranian authorities for unauthorized filmmaking. The selection of the German entry will take place on August 21 and 22 in Munich. Check out the full list of German movies here.

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Germany has revealed the 13 titles that it will consider for submission to the 97th Academy Awards, including Cannes award-winner The Seed Of The Sacred Fig by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof.

Further features in the selection include Andreas Dresen’s From Hilde, With Love and Matthias Glasner’s Dying, which both played in Competition at this year’s Berlinale; Fabian Stumm’s Sad Jokes, set to screen at Toronto; and documentary Hollywoodgate, directed by German-based Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at, which premiered at Venice in 2023.

Although set in Tehran with a predominantly Iranian cast and crew, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig...

The German coalition government has earmarked a substantial increase for national film funding in its draft budget for 2025.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cabinet has proposed increasing the money available for the national cultural film funding programme run by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Bkm).

Funding for shorts and feature-length projects will have an additional €7.5m to allocate in 2025, bringing the total to €18m. Another €2m is set to be channelled into the fund for 2026-2027, taking the total available to €20m.

Meanwhile, a new funding category to support projects b up-and-coming filmmaking talents will be introduced...

’The Light’ is one of a slate of features to receive backing from German regional fund Film-und Medienstiftung Nrw.

The Light, Tom Tykwer’s first film for the cinema since his 2016 German-us comedy A Hologram For The King is one of 10 feature film projects allocated almost €6m in production support by the Düsseldorf-based regional fund Film-und Medienstiftung Nrw.

Tykwer’s original screenplay for The Light (Das Licht) centres on a troubled family who take on a Syrian immigrant as a housekeeper. When she successfully shakes up the lives of the family she then confronts them with the dark fate of her own.

For their 5th annual event, which is set to run Sept. 8-11, the Sydney Underground Film Festival is looking a little more demented than ever. And that’s saying a lot for this scrappy, still relatively young fest, which typically offers ample twisted cinematic offerings.

The fun kicks off with the Opening Night film, the demented superhero comedy Super, written and directed by former Troma go-to screenwriter James Gunn (Tromeo & Juliet); then ends with the Closing Night wallowing in Sydney’s seedy underbelly, X, by homegrown filmmaker Jon Hewitt.

Crammed between these two excursions into violence and depravity is a lineup filled with perverse visions, scandalous public figures, sickening horror, experimental pop culture remixes and more.

For Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film, the highlight of the fest is Usama Alshaibi‘s Profane, a complex psychological, psychosexual, spiritual morality play about a Muslim sex worker who endures a “reverse...

  Cologne, Germany -- Documentaries have made a comeback at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, with non-fiction titles spread across the festival's sections. The Perspektive Deutsches Kino lineup of young German cinema is no different. Docs make up nearly half of the 2010 program.

Most are unflinching looks at present-day reality, such as Anna Hoffmann's "The Housemaid," a portrait of Polish domestic servant working in Germany; or the self-explanatory "Portraits of German alcoholics" from Carolin Schmitz.

Even the fictional films this year have a strong strain of realism -- such as "Outside" from Florian Schewe, which follows a man trying to help his friend who has recently been released from prison. Or Juliane Engelmann's "Scars in Concrete" about a young mother trapped on the edges of society.

Perspektives will also welcome back director Rp Kahl, who took part in the section in it's inaugural year in 2002. Kahl is back with "Bedways,...