By exploring the relationship between the watched and the watching, our film uncovers the trauma and hope engendered by the Chinese all-surveilling state and lends a voice to those that stand in resilient defiance of such blatant abuse of power.
Documentary about Svetlana Geier, a Ukranian who has translated the great works of Dostoyevsky into German. First her father ends up in one of Stalin's prison camps, then young Svetlana herself experiences the German invasion. In order to survive she learns German at home in Kiev. She is good and gets work as a translator before ending up in a German camp in 1943. Now, 65 years later, she is a renowned translator who in her twilight years has translated the great works of Dostoevsky. For the first time in all these years, she returns to Kiev together with her granddaughter.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline described the period he spent in Sigmaringen in his delirious and infernal novel, Castle to Castle, published in 1957. The last months before the German “moment of truth”, as they’ve never been portrayed before: Documented in delirious reality. A documentary film based on Céline’s texts. A screen adaption with documentary material.
Love & Engineering is for everyone who has experienced uncertainty, had a crush on someone or been on a date. The film asks what are our so-called “feelings” and can we can control them or not. Challenges of the dating world are approached through the perspective of male engineers: how to encounter people in the real world? The film reveals that falling in love happens in three phases and that charming your date could be just a matter of adept hacking skills!
The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.
When Jan Peters' girlfriend accidentally takes his wallet on a trip to foreign climes, she leaves the filmmaker standing in Frankfurt Airport without a penny to his name. The only capital he possesses is a group ticket for the public transport system. After hearing about people who supplement their inadequate incomes by 'escorting' groups of tourists across the city, Mr Peters decides to apply the same method to his own situation. The filmmaker starts a business as an 'independent travel escort' and enters an obscure world of supplementary jobs and adventurous business models.
Unfulfilled dreams, expectations and competition in the closely interwoven relationships between a mother and her two daughters. Observations of a fragile triangular relationship in an icy microcosm.
They live on the edge of the known world - far from civilization but affected by its consequences nonetheless. The photographer Markus Mauthe visited these last indigenous peoples to capture the inherent beauty of their cultures, before they too fall victim to ever-advancing globalisation. The journey leads from South Sudan and Ethiopia to Malay sea nomads and Brazilian Indians in Mato Grosso, who have started to defend themselves against the destruction of their natural habitat. The result is a film that captures intimate and unadulterated encounters with sumptuous photography – while also serving as an appeal for the preservation of indigenous cultures, which will surely perish unless we rethink and act accordingly.
Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.
A humorous observation in Barcelona’s immigrant neighbourhood El Raval. Four barber shops, four places of remembrance, strange time and space capsules inhabited by people who left their home to find a better one, while the Spaniards are about to leave their own country themselves.
The sirens blare out; a catastrophe is rehearsed. Hyperreal practice-runs, planning exercises and simulations give rise to the disturbing dystopia of emergency. The film of the hour: thrilling, complex and alarming.
In Seda, a remote peat miners' town in Latvia, time seems to be frozen in the Soviet era. Built in 1952 and inhabited by a multi-ethnic workforce from different parts of the former USSR, it still preserves intact the inflated style of a Stalinist "shock work" construction project. Culturally Seda's people feel like a community apart. Their lingua franca is Russian, and their social life is a mixture of Soviet and Russian Orthodox traditions. They don't want the European Union, they want to live in their own state - the Marshland.
The film tells a very personal story from two perspectives: our protagonist is both doctor and patient. As a patient, he has struggled with recurring depression for years, and as a doctor he wants to find out why. The search for the origins of his illness leads him into the realm of his own genes and casts light on the fundamental changes facing modern society as a result of the tremendous progress being made in the field of genetic sequencing. Along the way, he meets a host of people – researchers, artists, visionaries – who have developed their own very individual approach to genetic coding and are drawing attention to the social significance of genetic technology. The film does not restrict itself to a scientific view of the subject but also makes use of artistic visions and more playful approaches to genetic blueprints.
In order to rescue his father's ramshackle grill restaurant, filmmaker and vegetarian Dario Aguirre is traveling back to his homeland Ecuador. What starts out as a strange debate about opening times, chips and Excel spread sheets, develops into a moving family drama.
After the destructions that where caused by the tsunami, the insulars of an Indian archipelago are rolled over by another surge of ruination: the flood of international aid organizations, which pluck this premodern civilisation into the 21st century. The film depicts the partially heroic attempts of the Nicobareses, to live in this world without drowning.
Portrait about the planning and rehearsal of Richard Wagner's Parsifal directed by Calixto Bieito at the opera house in Stuttgart.
