The best Paul Berndt’s movies

In the latter half of the 19th century, gold is discovered in the Black Hills, an area which has already been allocated to the Dakota Indians as a winter reservation in a treaty. Nevertheless, gold diggers, profiteers and adventurers flock to the region. Among them is the hard-hearted land speculator Bludgeon, who tries to expel the Indians using brutal methods like slaughtering entire herds of buffalo. The Dakotas take their revenge by attacking a Union Pacific train. While Chief Farsighted Falcon and his men are out hunting, Bludgeon and his gang massacre the Indian village. The Dakota warriors retaliate and soon the gold diggers' town becomes the scene of a giant battle.

Farsighted Falcon, the Dakota chief, seeks refuge in the Black Hills with his wife Blue Hair and two warriors, the sole survivors of his tribe, in order to join part of the Cheyenne headed by Chief Little Wolf. On the way, they are attacked by the bandit Jim Bashan and his gang. On the orders of mining boss Harrington, Bashan is terrorizing the inhabitants of Tanglewood and regularly stealing goods from the successful trader Sam Blake.

This rather unconventional Western movie is set in the middle of the 19th century in Arizona. The film portrays an Indian tribe, the Mimbreno Appacheans, who are celebrating their Thanksgiving, building an irrigation plant, carrying on commerce, and trying to settle down in a rather constricted territory. But the confrontation with the white Americans changes their situation as the mercantile "gentlemen" want to prevent the Indian tribe to become independent from the white men′s business practices. Thus, they destroy the irrigation plant and chase the Indian tribe in an inhospitable territory where they cannot survive. Led by their chief Ulzana, the Appacheans thus start a bitter fight to preserve their habitat.

1964 DEFA, East German Film by Konrad Wolf based on the novel by Christa Wolf. Tale of star-crossed lovers divided by worldviews in a divided Berlin.

Telling the prisoners of a death camp. Boxer Tony Majer, who got into a concentration camp for a fight with the Gestapo, remembers the murderous work in quarries, on the cruel torture of the Nazis and prison solidarity that helped him survive.

The two-piece black and white movie "Brennende Ruhr" portrays the events during the Kapp-Putsch 1920 in a small german town in the Ruhr district. The main protagonist is Ernst Sukrow, a student who sympathises first with the bourgeois forces but finally decided to join the communists in their fight.

Film by Jindrich Polák.

The electrician Peter Drews is a brigadier at a Baltic Sea dockyard. His men are among the most reliable and diligent workers at the dockyard. Their motivation, however, increasingly suffers from Peter’s narcissism and imperiousness. Even his girlfriend Brigitte who is also a member of the brigade finds it increasingly difficult to accept his behavior. One day, Peter decides that the entire group must enter the navy - just because he has received his conscription call. While four men follow Peter into the navy, Brigitte, who has broken up with Peter, takes over the control of the brigade. During the work at the ship on which Peter is based at she meets the charming lieutenant Asmus.

Film by Richard Groschopp.

Kasper Mai, an export merchant and comrade with a “clean” record, discovers he is the prince of Hohenlohe-Liebenstein. His royal grandmother designates him as the heir to her estate. A private trip to her reveals that she does not want a NATO airbase built on her land. The GDR and his grandmother thus find a common interest, and a clever lawyer from the East works against other family members looking to settle their debts with the estate money.

In this German drama, Brock (Albert Hetterle), a railroad inspector, witnesses a robbery at a train depot. He recognizes the thief, but turning the man in would mean acknowledging he knows him, thus revealing his own complicity with the Nazi war machine. When Brock's daughter (Annekathrin Bürger) and her boyfriend (Horst Jonischkan) begin to question him about the incident, will the secret he's kept for nearly 20 years finally be exposed?