In the organizer's words:

M-cine plays "The Doll"
Silent movie set to new music

Laughing muscle training guaranteed!

M-cine does not fall back on existing silent film compositions, but looks at the films of its choice with today's perspective and explores their language. Is it conventional or experimental? Loud or quiet? M-cine develops the musical material for the film from these questions. Improvised and fully composed elements intertwine. This makes every silent movie evening unique and full of the joy of experimentation. A comedy of mistaken identity by Ernst Lubitsch completes the series on 07.12.2025 at 6 pm.

"A film from the collection of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden."

In his silent film "The Doll", the director pokes fun at common gender roles with dry wit and humor. Lancelot has an unusual problem: forty virgins are chasing him all over the village! His rich hereditary uncle, Baron de Chanterelle, has ordered Lancelot to finally find himself a wife so that the noble family does not die out. But Lancelot refuses to marry. The solution? A doll wedding! Who sells lifelike dolls complete with operating instructions, how Lancelot marries his doll and how much life of its own such a relationship can ultimately tolerate: the audience follows all this in a furious tour de force of hilarious ideas. But that's not all - nostalgia for home comes free of charge. Each evening opens with a very special short film from Cologne's early film history. Naturally with a film score specially composed by M-cine. Something chocolatey is of course also included...

The historical film "Nothilfe Köln, 1930/31" celebrates its world premiere on 7.12.25 at Theater 509 in the Bürgerhaus Stollwerk.Stefanie Wüster-Bludau (media and cultural scientist), on the board of the Köln im Film association, knows the background to the film document "Nothilfe Köln" from 1930/31: "Despite its age and the extremely sensitive nitro material, the silent film shot on 35 mm was surprisingly still in quite good condition and was given to the association from private family property at the end of 2021, with the indication that the film was given to the family by a cameraman on the run in 1945 towards the end of the war. The author of the film was not known and could not be determined from the material.Thanks to a project grant from the City of Cologne's "City History Funding Programme", Köln im Film e.V. was able to secure the historical film material in its collection and have it digitized and historically classified. The film data has been included in the Köln im Film database and has been visible on the website ever since. The documentary was made at the time of the global economic crisis and shows the "emergency aid" distribution points and facilities in various districts of Cologne. It is one of the few surviving contemporary documents from Cologne in the 1930s and also one of the last silent film productions. The new composition by the musician duo M-cine is a wonderful opportunity to present the film to a Cologne audience for the first time.

Köln im Film e.V. has been researching and presenting Cologne's film and cinema history for over 20 years and publishes the results on the website www.koeln-im-film.de and in an extensive database. In regular film series and cooperative events, the association presents films from and about Cologne from the beginnings of cinema history in 1896 to the present day, showing the city's history in moving images and thus representing the city's cinematic memory.

www.m-cine.de

Price information:

B.O. 23,- €/ 19,- € (reduced) / VVK 19,- € / 15,- € (reduced) (+fees).