Coming Out

Coming Out

Coming Out

Share

Coming Out

"In the end, you have to follow your heart."

1989

1h 53m

6.5(47 votes)

Drama

Romance

Overview

Philipp, a closeted teacher, is dating a female colleague to keep up appearances. One night he stumbles into a gay bar and falls for a man. Transformed by this love, he is no longer afraid to face up to who he is.

Links & Resources

Website IMDbView

Social & External

Production Companies

DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme

The people behind it

Cast & crew

10 featured cast members

Starring

Matthias Freihof

Matthias Freihof

Philipp Klarmann

Dagmar Manzel

Dagmar Manzel

Tanja

Dirk Kummer

Dirk Kummer

Matthias

Michael Gwisdek

Michael Gwisdek

Achim

Werner Dissel

Werner Dissel

Älterer Homosexueller Walter

Gudrun Ritter

Gudrun Ritter

Frau Möllemann / Serviererin

Walfriede Schmitt

Walfriede Schmitt

Philipps Mutter Frau Klarmann

Axel Wandtke

Axel Wandtke

Jakob

Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss

Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss

Araber

René Schmidt

Junger Mann im Park

Creative team

Directed by: Heiner Carow
Written by: Erika Richter
Wolfram Witt

Similar Movies

Dear Boys

Dear Boys

Lieve Jongens explores the sexual fantasies of a middle-aged writer and the handsome young men who dominate his life. Wolf, a successful writer of romantic novels, is plagued by self doubt and writer's block. Though pleasant looking and well-preserved, he fears age will rob him of the youthful companionship he so desperately craves. With the help of his equally randy and manipulative young sex partner, Wolf plots to seduce the gentle Muskrat from the arms of a much older lover.

Hidden Away

Hidden Away

At the age of 14 the world around you changes at a dizzying speed. But what if actually it's you that changing? What if these changes take you away from what up until now, has been your world? Ibrahim and Rafa are going to suffer these changes for themselves, experiencing first love in a way they never could have imagined. And having to keep it Hidden away.

Dyketactics

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.

Le Crime d'amour

Le Crime d'amour

To emerge from anonymity, a young man assumes responsibility for a crime he did not commit.

Witness

Witness

A revered small-town imam faces a crisis of faith when he must choose between upholding the values of his mosque or protecting the safety and spiritual belonging of a male congregant.

American Beauty

American Beauty

Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis, decides to turn his hectic life around after developing an infatuation with his daughter's attractive friend.

Walk on Water

Walk on Water

Eyal, an Israeli Mossad agent, is given the mission to track down and kill the very old Alfred Himmelman, an ex-Nazi officer, who might still be alive. Pretending to be a tourist guide, he befriends his grandson Axel, in Israel to visit his sister Pia. The two men set out on a tour of the country, during which Axel challenges Eyal's values.

9 Songs

9 Songs

Matt, a young glaciologist, soars across the vast, silent, icebound immensities of the South Pole as he recalls his love affair with Lisa. They meet at a mobbed rock concert in a vast music hall - London's Brixton Academy. They are in bed at night's end. Together, over a period of several months, they pursue a mutual sexual passion whose inevitable stages unfold in counterpoint to nine live-concert songs.

The Secret

The Secret

Julian is in a dilemma. He loves the person, he is in a relationship with, less than his best friend.

Paradise Now

Paradise Now

Two childhood friends are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

Billy Elliot

Billy Elliot

County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.

Dressed in Blue

Dressed in Blue

A documentary about the lives of six transgender women in post-Franco Spain.

Twins

Twins

One swipe leads to a steamy reunion with a familiar face—but it’s his ex’s twin, and now he’s caught in a messy emotional triangle.

Saudade

Saudade

Mike, a young adult, waiting to go out on a date with his boyfriend is thwarted by a life-changing event. It is told from the perspective of his mirror.

Buddies

Buddies

David, a naive graduate student, has volunteered to work as a 'buddy' for people dying of AIDS. Assigned to the intensely political Robert, a lifelong activist whose friends and family have abandoned him following his diagnosis, the two men, each with notably different world views, soon discover common bonds, as David's inner activist awakens and Robert's need for emotional release is fulfilled.

Beyond the Walls

Beyond the Walls

This 1985 Spanish film reveals one of the many terrible aspects of 16th century Spain, still plagued by the radical Christian Inquisition, one of a plethora of difficulties Spaniards faced at the time. Spanish super star Carmen Maura plays a nun who agrees to a selfless scam, a fake stigmata, only to avoid separation from her lover, another nun. It's a serious and passionate work, highlighting the theme of outspoken women-against-repression, seen in other good gay and lesbian films. This is not a lesbian "Nun sense" or another "Dark Habits" (by Almodovar, which also starred Carmen Maura, and also set in a Spanish convent, with some lesbian nuns). Perhaps, best of all, 'Extramuros' is realistic and frank. It isn't shy about its characters' sexuality. Their sexuality, and the film as a whole are genuine.

Bad Education

Bad Education

When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain

In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.

The Elementary Particles

The Elementary Particles

Based on Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel, Atomised (aka The Elementary Particles) focuses on Michael and Bruno, two very different half-brothers and their disturbed sexuality. After a chaotic childhood with a hippie mother only caring for her affairs, Michael, a molecular biologist, is more interested in genes than women, while Bruno is obsessed with his sexual desires, but mostly finds his satisfaction with prostitutes. But Bruno's life changes when he gets to know the experienced Christiane. In the meantime, Michael meets Annabelle, the love of his youth, again.

All About My Mother

All About My Mother

Following the tragic death of her teenage son, Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona in an attempt to contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. She reunites with an old friend, an outspoken transgender sex worker, and befriends a troubled actress and a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.

Recommended Movies

Maurice

Maurice

After his lover rejects him, Maurice attempts to come to terms with his sexuality within the restrictiveness of Edwardian society.

Cabaret

Cabaret

Inside the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin, starry-eyed singer Sally Bowles and an impish emcee sound the clarion call to decadent fun, while outside a certain political party grows into a brutal force.

My Policeman

My Policeman

In the late 1990s, the arrival of elderly invalid Patrick into Marion and Tom’s home triggers the exploration of seismic events from 40 years previous: the passionate relationship between Tom and Patrick at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

Miller's Girl

Miller's Girl

A talented young writer embarks on a creative odyssey when her teacher assigns a project that entangles them both.

Apt Pupil

Apt Pupil

One day in 1984, Todd Bowden, a brilliant high school boy fascinated by the history of Nazism, stumbles across an old man whose appearance resembles that of Kurt Dussander, a wanted Nazi war criminal. A month later, Todd decides to knock on his door.

Children of a Lesser God

Children of a Lesser God

Starting his new job as an instructor at a New England school for the deaf, James Leeds meets Sarah Norman, a young deaf woman who works at the school as a member of the custodial staff. In spite of Sarah's withdrawn emotional state, a romance slowly develops between the pair.

Heartstopper Forever

Heartstopper Forever

It's a new school year for the Truham-Higgs gang. As Nick and Charlie's relationship deepens, their thoughts turn to life after the last bell rings.

Plainclothes

Plainclothes

In 1990s New York, an undercover police officer receives an assignment to lure and arrest gay men. However, he's surprised to discover a scintillating connection with one of his targets. As their secret connection deepens and internal pressure to deliver arrests intensifies, he finds himself torn between duty and desire.

Disobedience

Disobedience

New York photographer Ronit flies to London after learning about the death of her estranged father. Ronit is returning to the same Orthodox Jewish community that shunned her decades earlier for her childhood attraction to Esti, a female friend. Their fortuitous and happy reunion soon reignites their burning passion as the two women explore the boundaries of faith and sexuality.

Total Eclipse

Total Eclipse

Young, wild poet Arthur Rimbaud and his mentor Paul Verlaine engage in a fierce, forbidden romance while feeling the effects of a hellish artistic lifestyle.

Bent

Bent

Max is a handsome young man who, after a fateful tryst with a German soldier, is forced to run for his life. Eventually Max is placed in a concentration camp where he pretends to be Jewish because in the eyes of the Nazis, gays are the lowest form of human being. But it takes a relationship with an openly gay prisoner to teach Max that without the love of another, life is not worth living.

Camp Belvidere

Camp Belvidere

Camp Belvidere is a lesbian romance set in the 1950s about the coming of age of Camp Leader Rose and her forbidden encounter with Nurse Gin. It depicts the journey and evolution of a friendship into a romance between two women when their rapport would have been unlikely.

Behind the Candelabra

Behind the Candelabra

Based on the autobiographical novel, the tempestuous 6-year relationship between Liberace and his (much younger) lover, Scott Thorson, is recounted.

Cracks

Cracks

Jealousy flares after the headmistress of an elite boarding school for girls becomes obsessed with a new student.

Those People

Those People

On Manhattan's gilded Upper East Side, a young gay painter is torn between an obsession with his infamous best friend and a promising new romance with an older foreign pianist.

Mammal

Mammal

After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

The unconventional life of Dr. William Marston, the Harvard psychologist and inventor who helped invent the modern lie detector test and co-created Wonder Woman in 1941.

The Man from Elysian Fields

The Man from Elysian Fields

A failed novelist's inability to pay the bills strains relations with his wife and leads him to work at an escort service, where he becomes entwined with a wealthy woman whose husband is a successful writer.

Rachel, Rachel

Rachel, Rachel

Rachel is a 35-year-old school teacher who has no man in her life and lives with her mother. When a man from the big city returns and asks her out, she begins to have to make decisions about her life and where she wants it to go.

Gabriel's Inferno: Part II

Gabriel's Inferno: Part II

Professor Gabriel Emerson finally learns the truth about Julia Mitchell's identity, but his realization comes a moment too late. Julia is done waiting for the well-respected Dante specialist to remember her and wants nothing more to do with him. Can Gabriel win back her heart before she finds love in another's arms?