German films about coming of age

TILT is a love story set against the backdrop of the changing political and social environment in Europe in the late 80's and early 90's. Can this love survive the challenges of emigration, a violent homeland and immoral social atmosphere thanks to a gang of adventurous friends?

A strange family: 17-year-old Phil lives with his mother and twin sister in an old mansion on the outskirts of town. When he returns from summer camp, the mood in the mansion has soured somehow. Phil doesn’t worry about it, hanging out with his best friend Kat instead. When he starts to feel attracted to a mysterious new student at school, Phil is plunged into emotional turmoil only exacerbated by the trouble at home.

The nine-year-old Nikolas has been missing for days. The criminal psychologist Claudia Meinert notices contradictions in her conversation with the parents of the missing child. In particular Nikolas' mother appears to be hiding something. When a video of the missing Nikolas surfaces, showing him tied up in a cellar, the trail leads to his school. The 13-year-old Leon and Mathilda strike the psychologist as conspicuous and provocative. Shortly afterwards, Meinert encounters the children with Nikolas' parents at the local swimming pool and her suspicions are confirmed: the parents are entangled in an insidious father-mother-child game with the possible suspects Leon and Mathilda. Now it is up to the psychologist to resolve the dark mystery of Nikolas' disappearance and save the child.

Summer 1968. 14-year-old Wolfgang is deported from his family in the secluded Church Welfare Institution sanctuary. One thing is clear for Wolfgang: His yearning for freedom, he will not soon buried in the bog.

The romantic and coming-of-age misadventures of a 13-year-old American living in Germany.

Szabolcs plays in a German football team, as does Bernard. They are roommates, best friends, inseparable. A lost match makes him reconsider his life and he goes back to Hungary in hope for more simplicity. Yet his solitude does not last long. Soon after his arrival he meets Áron and a mutual attraction between the two boys develops when suddenly Szabolcs receives an unexpected phone call from Bernard: he has arrived to Hungary...

Helen is a nonconformist teenage girl who maintains a conflictual relationship with her parents. Hanging out most of her time with her friend Corinna, with whom she breaks one social taboo after another, she uses sex as a way to rebel and break the conventional bourgeois ethic. After an intimate shaving accident, Helen ends up in the hospital where it doesn’t take long before she makes waves. But there she finds Robin, a male nurse who will sweep her off her feet...

Teenage Sascha has two dreams: to write a novel about her mother and to take revenge on her step-father who brutally murdered her. When she meets the newspaper editor Volker, he invites her to come to his and his son's place. A subtle love triangle begins which helps Sascha to find her personal way of growing up.

Two outsiders travel around the countryside during school holidays.

A luxury hotel. Steaks frizzle, muffintops getting massaged. Clemens (rare) joins the wellness area as a rookie. Lara (well-done) needs to assert herself in the kitchen pack. The elevator brings the two of them together. They encounter each other, until they clash.

A fateful day pushes an aimless college dropout (Tom Schilling) to stop wasting his time and finally engage with life.

Thomas, a father in his fifties, returns by chance to the town where he grew up. He collapses and wakes up forty years earlier in the body of his teenage self. Thrown back into his past, Thomas will not only have to re-live his first love, but also try to understand the reasons for his father’s mysterious departure. Can you change the past by living it again?

Alex, Fedja, Timo and Lara are four troubled teens for whom the upcoming Christmas eve isn't a time of peace and joy: Since they all have a history of escalating family conflicts, they'll be spending the holidays not at home, but in a psychiatric ward. The utterly different adolescents not only have to adjust to one another, but also have to confront themselves in exhausting therapy sessions. Yet thanks to the unorthodox psychiatrist Dr. Wolf, the sessions take a turn for the unexpected - and the four experience a Christmas which they will never forget.

Vienna, 1937, on the eve of the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. The young and inexperienced Franz Huchel begins to learn about both the joys and hardships of life by working as an apprentice to the mutilated war veteran Otto Trsnjek in a small tobacco shop, where he meets the famous psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, who will become a valuable friend in times of chaos and uncertainty.

How Murat Kurnaz ended up in Guantanamo Bay is a mysterious story. 5 YEARS investigates the psychological aspect of this endless and unjustified "imprisonment" where Kurnaz had to endure never ending physical and psychological torture.

Donato fails in his attempt to save a drowning man, and meets one of the man's friends. He decides to start his life over, but pieces of his past keep coming after him.

A group of kids grow up on the short, wrong (east) side of the Sonnenallee in Berlin, right next to one of the few border crossings between East and West reserved for German citizens. The antics of these kids, their families, of the "West German" friends and relatives who come to visit, and of the East German border guards, all serve to illustrate the absurdity of everyday life on the Sonnenallee, and therefore throughout the former East Germany.

It's summer. One endless, sexy party under the open sky. Tina and her friends are living the dream of a whole generation of decadent Berlin-party-kids. But after one excessive night she's haunted by a mysterious ugly creature in nightmares she has. The only person she talks about her fears to is her psychologist. His advice is to confront her fears and to reach out to the creature. At first Tina refuses but after she hears about her parents' plans to put her in a mental hospital she starts talking to the creature. She slowly realizes that the creature is an incarnation of her fears and that it has the same feelings she does. Afraid of being called a freak she starts hiding the creature in her room. After a while she even gets close to it. It's almost like a relationship with a wild stray animal. For the first time in her life, it almost seems as if Tina has the courage to be herself. But then her parents and her friends see the creature…

Poor Bibi - due to her bad marks in maths she has to spend the whole summer in the boarding school of Altenberg to scrape through a series of exams - otherwise she'd stay down in school, being forced to repeat the year. No camping, no white-water rafting, no vacation at all. So it doesn't surprise anyone that the young witch is quite disgruntled when arriving at Altenberg Castle. Her roommate is a touchy unpleassant fashion victim and headmaster Quirin Bartels is so muddle-headed that he can't even remember the names of his students properly. But then Bibi makes friends with Elea, a girl wheelchair-bound since a terrible accident where she also lost her beloved parents. Now Bibi is determined to help the sensitive Elea, searching a way to heal her from her palsy legs.

In 1942, Friedrich Weimer's boxing skills get him an appointment to a National Political Academy (NaPolA) – high schools that produce Nazi elite. Over his father's objections, Friedrich enrolls. During his year in seventh column,Friedrich encounters hazing, cruelty, death, and the Nazi code. His friendship with Albrecht, the ascetic son of the area's governor, is central to this education.

Two years have passed. There is a normal life, but handsome Ludo meets his old love, and Anna is very jealous...

Pio Amato, a 14 year-old member of a small Romani community in southern Italian town of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, is in a hurry to grow up. Pio follows his older brother Cosimo everywhere and from him he learns how to hustle and how to navigate the streets of his hometown. One night Pio sets out to prove to his brother that he is as good or better than him but, when things go wrong, a series of events will forever change the way he sees the world.

While spending the summer at her grandmother's farm, a girl (Hanna Höppner) discovers a talent for communicating with horses and tries to tame a fierce stallion.

A young Arab is caught between cultures as he is sent to a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Israel in the 1980s.

Keeping secrets can be difficult, especially when you’re a twelve-year-old half-vampire moving from Transylvania to a new life in Germany. Going to school, making new friends and fitting in — it’s all tough when you can’t just be yourself. With a vampire father and a human mother, sisters Dakaria (Daka) and Silvania don’t live in your typical blended family. Each girl embraces a different side of her genetic makeup: Daka wishes she was 100% vampire; Silvania wishes she was 100% human; and both believe they can finally realize their hearts’ desires when the opportunity to change presents itself. Will Daka and Silvania realize that, sometimes, your uniqueness is your greatest strength?

Summer of 1945. A temporary orphanage is established in an abandoned palace surrounded by forests for the eight children liberated from the Gross-Rosen camp. Hanka, also a former inmate, becomes their guardian. After the atrocities of the camp, the protagonists slowly begin to regain what is left of their childhood but the horror returns quickly. Camp Alsatians roam the forests around. Released by the SS earlier on, they have gone feral and are starving. Looking for food they besiege the palace. The children are terrified and their camp survival instinct is triggered.

When 17-year-old Ben visits his father Heinrich in Marrakech, it is the start of an adventurous journey through a foreign country with a picturesque charm and a rough beauty where everything appears possible — including the chance that father and son will lose each other for good, or find one another again.

Set in Brazil, three kids who make a discovery in a garbage dump soon find themselves running from the cops and trying to right a terrible wrong.

During a medical examination, 13-year-old Aslan is humiliated in front of a load of his fellow pupils. The incident unleashes his latent personality disorder. Plagued by self-doubt, he strives for cleanliness and perfection and is obsessed with trying to control everything around him. His compulsion draws Aslan, who lives with his grandmother in a village in Kazakhstan, into increasingly difficult situations. He abhors the way most of his fellow pupils are held in the sway of a criminal scheme, in which Bolat, one of Aslan’s tormentors, is also involved. Bolat blackmails the younger children into paying him protection money; he has nothing but contempt for ostracised Aslan.

When the farmer's away, all the animals play, and sing, and dance. Eventually, though, someone has to step in and run things, a responsibility that ends up going to Otis, a carefree cow.

On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants. Pai, an 11-year-old girl in a patriarchal New Zealand tribe, believes she is destined to be the new chief. But her grandfather Koro is bound by tradition to pick a male leader. Pai loves Koro more than anyone in the world, but she must fight him and a thousand years of tradition to fulfill her destiny.

A Retrovirus, which was conceived as a tool for industrial genetic engineering, has gotten out of control and is spreading rapidly. While it crosses all organisms within our ecological system completely indiscriminately (mixing plant with animal and humans) most plants prove more resistant because of their complex DNA. However, the simple genes of the plants lead humans to become grotesque mutations, in most cases even to death. Within one week, 90% of mankind are either extinct or no longer human. However, a small fraction of the earth?s population remains immune to the virus and must survive in this new and constantly changing ecological system. Tom cellar is one the survivors and on an old military base in the Eifel he has entrenched himself. Further survivors come together and succeed in carving out a life in this new world. But the GMOs - the ?genetically modified organisms? - constantly develop themselves further, and soon the fence of the base offers no more protection.

Dramatised origin story of one of Germany's most beloved contemporary comedians.

Two brothers start a sportswear company in the 1920s, hoping to make the best shoes in the world. Their relationship deteriorates until they become bitter rivals.

A girl struggling with asthma is taken to a clinic in South Tyrol to be cured. After some time she decides to get out of this hell (that's how she feels about it) and soon she'll meet a new friend. Together they try to reach the peak of a mountain where, according to an old custom, she can be healed.

The film tells different stories in a kind of parallel Germany about love, affection and hatred.

In 1914 on a family estate, Oda helps a wounded anarchist, and as their illicit friendship deepens, a family turmoil erupts as the war closes in.

Parallel love stories of three young women in Berlin: Hannah - an unhappy attorney who sexually demeans herself in order to get at least some love and romance, Leni who runs a coffee shop and has just been ditched by her long term boyfriend, and Vivienne who ends up falling in love with a puppy-eyed pasta designer with 21 dogs.

The adventures of three teenage girls - Inken, Vicky and Lena - and their quest to have their first orgasm.

Juliane's happiness seems perfect. She is head over heals in love and has just begun a new life with August. One morning, however, she wakes up to find that she has been unexplainable thrown back into her past - to the time before she met her new love. Is what seems at first glance a cruel setback in reality actually a second chance?

Will Freeman is a hip Londoner who one day realizes that his friends are all involved with the responsibilities of married life and that leaves him alone in the cold. Passing himself off as a single father, he starts to meet a string of single mums, confident in his ability to leave them behind when they start to ask for a commitment. But Will's hope of a continued bachelorhood is interrupted when he meets 12-year old Marcus, in many ways his complete opposite.

A girl who always tends to fall in love with the wrong guy meets one who believes the world is coming to an end next Tuesday.

An American backpacker gets involved with a ring of drug smugglers as their driver, and winds up on the run from his employers across Munich's autobahns.

Hartmut Mackowiak, a German taxi driver, tries to help 6 year old Turkish girl to find her mother.

A young reindeer who suffers from vertigo learns to overcome his fear, takes flying lessons from a clumsy flying squirrel and heads to the North pole to save a troubled Santa and his fleet of flying reindeer.

Benjamin is a 16 year old half-side spastic with lousy grades in math, who switches to a boarding school to reach grammar school. Acclimatization to the new environment is difficult in the first place and he has to struggle with the various problems of coming of age, when he falls in love to the school's dream girl Malen.

Lore leads her four younger siblings across a war-torn Germany in 1945. Amidst the chaos she encounters a mysterious refugee who shatters her fragile reality with hatred and desire.

Faust inhabits an earthy, 19th-century world of primitive autopsies and medical rituals. He becomes obsessed with the beautiful Margarete and desperately turns to a physically grotesque moneylender to conjure their union.

It is a Saturday in autumn, and Karin and Simon are visiting their parents and youngest sister Clara. This family gathering provides the occasion for a dinner together, at which other relatives appear over the course of the day. While the family members animate the apartment’s space with their conversations, everyday activities and cooking preparations, the cat and dog range through the various rooms. they too become a central element in this quotidian familial dance that repeatedly manifests stylized elements, disrupting any naturalistic mode of presentation. In this way, adjoining spaces open up between family drama, fairy tale and the psychological study of a mother.

A dying 15-year-old boy draws stories of an invincible superhero as he struggles with his mortality.