The in-house cinema - one of the first municipal theaters of the Federal Republic of Germany - is one of the few places in Germany, in which full historical-film retrospectives and silent films with live musical accompaniment are regularly presented.

The then head, Enno Patalas, began with the restoration of German silent films from directors such as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, G.W.

The film museum houses the cinematic works of filmmakers, who as frontier workers cannot be assigned a national film archive, such as Orson Welles, Thomas Harlan, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Nicolas Humbert, Werner Schroeter and Wim Wenders.

Since 1995, the museum possesses the estates of Orson Welles, in particular to the materials of unfinished films.

The museum is co-organizer of the Internationale Stummfilmtage (International Silent Film Festival) in Bonn and displays a selection of the program later in Munich.