Martin Berger

The wealthy Frenchman Raoul lives with his mother and his cousin Therese in a magnificent villa on the Riviera. Therese is deeply in love with her relative, but he seems to reciprocate only "brotherly" affection. One day, a visitor arrives: the lustful Lydia, a friend of Therese's, known as a man-eating and amoral woman. It isn't long before Raoul, the master of the house, falls completely under the spell of the blonde siren from abroad, and the two become engaged and eventually married.

Portrays the deep intrigue and mystical fanaticism of the last days of the Romanoffs, when Rasputin, the mad monk had such a hold over them.

A public prosecutor's fiancée, who has just been hired as a teacher, lives in the front of a building, while a working-class family lives in the back of the building. The woman from a poor working class background wants to abort her fifth child, but the doctor refuses because it is illegal. The porter's wife advises the worker to do it herself.

Martin Berger's 'Menschen' serves as a harrowing socio-cinematic autopsy of the human spirit, adrift in the wreckage of a post-war landscape. Far from the escapist fantasies that often dominated early Weimar screens, this 1921 opus delves into the penumbral existence of the disenfranchised. The narrative follows a fatalistic trajectory, where the characters—portrayed with a raw, almost primitive intensity—grapple with the crushing weight of systemic indifference and personal moral decay.

The film tells the story of Ivan Mazeppa, a Ukrainian page at the Polish court who has an affair with the young wife of a much older count. Outraged when he learns of the incident, the nobleman has Mazeppa tied naked to a wild horse which is then released into the wilderness. The bulk of the poem describes the long hazardous journey during which Mazeppa almost dies twice but ultimately survives and returns to his native Ukraine.