From grim serial killer films and expressive, Oscar-submitted dramas to survivalist thrillers and box office hits, the end of the year is a good time look back on 2019’s German cinema slate.

Following four families in a small German town as they search for missing children, Netflix’s standout German-language sci-fi drama Dark proves just as compelling — as well as dramatic and philosophical — in its twisty second season.

Set during the Second World War, this thoughtful and reflective drama explores the friendship between a 17-year-old Austrian teen and Professor Sigmund Freud — and it's screening at the Jewish International Film Festival.

Shot in mere days and screening at this year’s Jewish International Film Festival, Anatol Schuster’s perceptive blend of comedy, tragedy and drama tells the tale of a nearly 90-year-old Berlin-based Holocaust survivor eager to end her life.

Comedian-turned-filmmaker Michael Bully Herbig turns a fascinating slice of history into a routine thriller in Balloon, which dramatises the 1979 defection, by hot air balloon, of two East German families. The film is screening in Australian cinemas to mark this month's 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The engaging and informative documentary It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story charts the genesis, influence and legacy of jazz label Blue Note Records — which was started in New York in 1939 by German-born jazz aficionados Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff.
 

Three decades after travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s death, German film director Werner Herzog pays tribute to his friend and kindred spirit in the fascinating, insightful and highly personal documentary Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin - which opens this year’s Antenna Documentary Film Festival.
 

Making his second documentary on the topic in two years, Chinese-born, Berlin-based artist and activist Ai Weiwei explores the impact of the global refugee crisis across Europe, crafting a stirring on-the-ground plea for compassion.

Adding to a genre of films that focus on wild, raucous evenings where anything and everything can happen, O Beautiful Night knows how to stage a strikingly surreal moment, and then another, and then more still. Alas, it fails in its attempts to splice them all together.

When Chuck takes Harmony on a road trip in his campervan, he’s just an average American guy trying to romance the object of his affection. When Sakurai chats with Pepper about her day, she’s an ordinary Japanese grandmother talking with an energetic, easily distracted child. But in Hi, AI not all is as it seems.

Matthew R. Young's short film Stille Nacht is set to screen at this year’s Down Under Berlin Film Festival. The filmmaker spoke to Kino in Oz's Sarah Ward about finding inspiration in a trip to Germany, telling intercultural stories and his hopes for the future of German-Australian cinema.
 

There’s little to say about Uwe Boll that hasn’t already been said. Fiercely opinionated and forcefully determined to let everyone know it, the German director has uttered much of it himself.

Focusing on a wayward girl already in the care of child services, System Crasher represents Germany’s addition to the fold, building upon a growing group of films that filter the world’s ills through its youngest hearts and minds.

Returning to the city’s cinemas from August 1–18, the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival achieves a familiar feat. It’s significant, too; running for almost three weeks, MIFF boasts the time and space to balance high-profile titles with lesser-known fare, ranging beyond hits and hype to deeper cuts.

Recently touring the country as part of the Goethe-Institut’s KinoKonzert series, The Golem makes its mastery known in every frame. It’s a feat of visual splendour — of finding an exacting image for every feeling and moment, and of steeping viewers in a particular emotional and contemplative headspace in the process.

Somehow both flat and melodic, and pitched perfectly to lull listeners into an unshakable sense of security, Werner Herzog’s voice could convince anyone of anything. Or, that’s how it feels to hear to his tantalising tone, no matter what he’s speaking about.

In a sign of the globe’s ever-concerning socio-political and environmental climate, cinematic apocalypses now arrive with a devil’s advocate-style argument. With such extensive damage wrought by humanity across the planet — against each other, as well as against the earth that we all rely upon for survival — who wouldn’t ponder the benefits of drastic population reduction techniques?

A dedicated mine excavator driver who also wrote music that made him a folk hero among his fellow GDR citizens: there’s perhaps no greater embodiment of internalised German conflict than Gerhard Gundermann.

Berlinale, Germany’s centrepiece film event, makes a concerted effort to open up the festival-going experience to younger viewers via its Generation strands — and it’s in this spirit that Australia’s German Film Festival follows.

With 'Bauhaus Spirit: 100 Years of Bauhaus', filmmakers Niels Bolbrinker and Thomas Tielsch tackle an ample project, and do so with multiple aims. To celebrate Bauhaus, the pioneering modernist design movement that stemmed from the post-World War I Weimar school of the same name, as founded by Walter Gropius, is to understand it — and so their documentary acts as both an ode and an explainer.

For Sydney cinephiles eager for a huge helping of German cinema, June promises a plethora of riches on the city’s big screens. The German Film Festival (GFF) will still be in full swing for the first third of the month, while the year’s biggest German-language film hits theatres as July draws near. And, of course, Sydney Film Festival (SFF) arrives right in the middle.

With its annual slate of world premieres, its coveted accolades and its position as the first major European film festival each year, Berlinale is no stranger to making history. When the projectors start whirring for the event’s 70th year in 2020, it’ll do so in a different way — not only with new co-directors at the helm, but with the festival’s first female director, Mariette Rissenbeek.

From retro-set series to classic film standouts, here is the best German-language fare that is currently available to stream.

The past year has delivered two high-profile films about the abhorrent concept of queer conversion therapy, or ‘praying away the gay’; however ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ and ‘Boy Erased’ have company in the form of German feature ‘Your Will Be Done’.