The best Peter Simonischek’s movies on Apple iTunes

Barents Sea, August 12th, 2000. During a Russian naval exercise, and after suffering a serious accident, the K-141 Kursk submarine sinks with 118 crew members on board. While the few sailors who are still alive barely manage to survive, their families push for accurate information and a British officer struggles to obtain from the Russian government a permit to attempt a rescue before it is late. But general incompetence are against all their efforts.

Without warning a father comes to visit his daughter abroad. He believes that she lost her humor and therefore surprises her with a rampage of jokes.

This German musical drama – German if we speak about the production country, and international when it comes to its essence – stars Peter Simonischek, the incredible mature actor who played the lead in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, which became one of the most notable premieres at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. His character in Crescendo resembles the one he played in Ade’s film, and if in the latter he portrayed a wonderful father to his daughter, the former features him as a father to the entire symphonic orchestra assembled from young Israeli-Palestinian musicians. The conductor tries to turn this potentially volatile ensemble into a professional unit, guided by his own principles of an artistic director – but that doesn’t work – and he has to engage his human feelings towards those young ‘participants’ of someone else’s war. In the end, music – the eternal art – will help them make peace.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, the woman who enraptured 19th century Europe’s greatest minds, recounts her life to Ernst Pfeiffer in this German film directed by Cordula Kablitz-Post. A published novelist, poet and essayist, Salomé’s desire to live a life free from convention scandalized society but spurred genius and passion in others, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée and her lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Under the tutelage of Sigmund Freud, she became the first female psychoanalyst.