The movie is based on the infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment" conducted in 1971. A makeshift prison is set up in a research lab, complete with cells, bars and surveillance cameras. For two weeks 20 male participants are hired to play prisoners and guards. The 'prisoners' are locked up and have to follow seemingly mild rules, and the 'guards' are told simply to retain order without using physical violence. Everybody is free to quit at any time, thereby forfeiting payment. In the beginning the mood between both groups is insecure and rather emphatic. But soon quarrels arise and the wardens employ ever more drastic sanctions to confirm their authority.

2001 film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

The Counterfeiters is the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch is the king of counterfeiters. He lives a mischievous life of cards, booze, and women in Berlin during the Nazi-era. Suddenly his luck runs dry when arrested by Superintendent Friedrich Herzog. Immediately thrown into the Mauthausen concentration camp, Salomon exhibits exceptional skills there and is soon transferred to the upgraded camp of Sachsenhausen. Upon his arrival, he once again comes face to face with Herzog, who is there on a secret mission. Hand-picked for his unique skill, Salomon and a group of professionals are forced to produce fake foreign currency under the program Operation Bernhard. The team, which also includes detainee Adolf Burger, is given luxury barracks for their assistance. But while Salomon attempts to weaken the economy of Germany's allied opponents, Adolf refuses to use his skills for Nazi profit and would like to do something to stop Operation Bernhard's aid to the war effort. Faced with a moral dilemma, Salomon must decide whether his actions, which could prolong the war and risk the lives of fellow prisoners, are ultimately the right ones.

High school teacher, Rainer Wenger, may be popular with the students, but he's also unorthodox. He's forced to teach autocracy for the school's project week. He's less than enthusiastic at first, but the response of the students is surprising to say the least. He forces the students to become more invested in the prospect of self rule, and soon the class project has its own power and eerily starts to resemble Germany's past. Can Wegner and his class realize what's happening before the horrors start repeating themselves?

The breath-taking story of a man who nearly would have changed the world. 1939, when Hitler convinced millions of people at the height of his power, one said a radical No: Georg Elser, disparaged as an assassin, is one of the greatest resistance fighters.

Based on a true story, North Face is a survival drama film about a competition to climb the most dangerous rock face in the Alps. Set in 1936, as Nazi propaganda urges the nation's Alpinists to conquer the unclimbed North Face of the Swiss massif--the Eiger--two reluctant German climbers begin their daring ascent.

Two young men, Martin Brest (Til Schweiger) and Rudi Wurlitzer (Jan Josef Liefers), both suffering from terminal cancer, get to know each other in a hospital room. They drown their desperation in tequila and decide to take one last trip to the sea. Drunk, and still in pajamas, they steal the first fancy car they find, a 1960s Mercedes convertible. The car happens to belong to a bunch of gangsters, who immediately start to chase it, since it contains more than the pistol Martin finds in the glove box.

It is 1942 and the German submarine fleet is heavily engaged in the so-called "Battle of the Atlantic" to harass and destroy British shipping. With better escorts of the destroyer class, however, German U-boats have begun to take heavy losses. "Das Boot" is the story of the crew of one such U-Boat, with the film examining how these submariners maintained their professionalism as soldiers and attempted to accomplish impossible missions, all the while attempting to understand and obey the ideology of the government under which they served.

The first German production from the world's leading Internet TV Network is set in a present-day German town where the disappearance of two young children exposes the double lives and fractured relationships among four families. In 10 hour-long episodes, the story takes on a surprising twist that ties back to the same town in 1986.

Set in a divided Germany in 1983, during a peak period for Cold War tensions between East and West. Martin Rauch, a wide-eyed 24-year-old East German soldier plucked from obscurity, goes undercover as a West German soldier for the East German Secret Service.

Berlin, 1941. Five friends eager to become heroes in an adventure that will change the face of Europe - and that will forever change them as well. Level-headed, highly decorated officer Wilhelm is off to the eastern front with his younger brother Friedhelm, a sensitive dreamer more interested in literature than warfare. Deeply in love with Wilhelm is Charlotte, a young nurse who looks forward to serving in the Wehrmacht, also on the eastern front. While Greta is a talented singer who longs to become another Marlene Dietrich, her Jewish boyfriend Viktor still cannot convince his parents to leave Germany... Valor and courage come to the fore, but also betrayal - of values, beliefs, humanity. Friedhelm turns into a soulless killing machine... Wilhelm deserts his troops and is court-martialed... Charlotte's Nazi ideology crumbles when she betrays a Jewish nurse helping the German army... Greta obtains papers for Viktor's escape by selling herself to an SS colonel. They and millions of others wanted to be heroes; but none of them could imagine what the war would ultimately do to them and to the rest of the world.

2013 German World War II television miniseries

A metropolis in turmoil. From economy to culture, politics to the underworld--everything is in the grip of radical change. Speculation and inflation are already tearing away at the foundations of the still-young Weimar Republic. Growing poverty and unemployment stand in stark contrast to the excesses and indulgence of the city's nightlife and its overflowing creative energy. Gereon Rath, a young police inspector from Cologne, is transferred to Berlin to solve a criminal case: a porno ring run by the Berlin Mafia. What at first glance appears to be a simple extortion case soon turns out to be a scandal that will forever change the lives of both Gereon and his closest associates. With his partner Bruno Wolter and stenotypist Charlotte Ritter, Rath confronts a tangled web of corruption, drug dealing, and weapons trafficking that forces him into an existential conflict as he is torn between loyalty and uncovering the truth. Who is friend, who is foe? With the political unrest spurred by May Day demonstrations and rising National Socialism, even an institution like the "Rote Burg," Berlin's police headquarters and the center of democracy and the constitutional state, is increasingly becoming the melting pot of a democracy whose days are numbered.

German thriller TV series set in the Weimar Republic

From July 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents takes place in a German village: A horse trips on a wire and throws the rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron's son is hung upside down in a mill; parents slap and bully their children; a man is cruel to his long-suffering lover; another sexually abuses his daughter. People disappear. A callow teacher who courts a nanny in the baron's household narrates the story and tries to investigate the connections among these accidents and crimes. What is foreshadowed? Are the children holy innocents? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world; the center cannot hold.

East Germany, the year 1989: A young man protests against the regime. His mother watches the police arresting him and suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. Some months later, the DDR does not exist anymore and the mother awakes. Since she has to avoid every excitement, the son tries to set up the DDR again for her in their flat. But the world has changed a lot.

A young Spanish woman who has recently moved to Berlin finds her flirtation with a local guy turn potentially deadly as their night out with his friends reveals a dangerous secret.

German Films & TV Shows

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