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Kurt Maetzig, pioneering East German filmmaker, dies at 101 Kurt Maetzig, one of East Germany’s pioneering filmmakers, died on August 8 at his home in the village of Wildkuhl, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in what used to be East Germany. Maetzig was 101. According to the New York Times obit, at first the half-Jewish Kurt Maetzig (born Jan. 25, 1911, in Berlin) made films that "scrutinized anti-Semitism, corporate complicity with fascism and other fault lines in German society that had opened the way to Nazi rule." Among Maetzig’s 30 narrative and documentary features are Marriage in the Shadows (1947), Council of the Gods (1950), The Sailor’s Song [...]...

The Twitch curated Attack The Bloc series of Cold War era science fiction films from the Eastern Bloc continues tonight at the Tiff Bell Lightbox with a rare screening of Kurt Maetzig's East German effort The Silent Star. Dramatically altered for Us release as First Spaceship On Venus by Roger Corman, this is your chance to see the film as it was originally created and meant to be seen - projected from 35mm.In the year 2003, with communism having conquered the globe and a new era of international peace, prosperity and cooperation secured, engineers discover what appears to be an alien artifact in the Gobi Desert. Scientists determine that the object is some kind of extraterrestrial flight recorder, and a partial decoding of its...

Just yesterday, Empire posted a photo of Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski surrounded by novelist David Mitchell and producers Uwe Schott, Philip Lee, Stefan Arndt and Grant Hill. The occasion? They'd just wrapped shooting at Studio Babelsberg on the most expensive German film since the days of Ufa, Cloud Atlas. Babelsberg, practically on life support after the fall of the Berlin wall, is thriving once again. And in February, the legendary studio celebrates its 100th anniversary.

To celebrate, the Berlin International Film Festival, running February 9 through 19, will be awarding the studio a Berlinale Camera and presenting a special series, "Happy Birthday, Studio Babelsberg." The lineup:

Fw Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1929/30) Josef von Báky's The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1943) Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) Kurt Maetzig's The Rabbit Is Me (1965) Konrad Wolf's Goya (1971) Roland Gräf's...