Strandfilm-Produktions GmbH

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

small planets is a film about isolated places and their inhabitants. In the era of globalization, when the world community seemingly moves together, we find groups of people living in isolated places, marginalized by the rest of the society.

Norbert Witte, once the king of the only amusement park of the former GDR, today he is behind bars in Germany. When fleeing bankruptcy in Berlin, Norbert Witte and his family secretly shipped their rollercoasters to Peru. Things went wrong here too. In a desperate attempt, Norbert tried to smuggle cocaine to Germany. Three years later his 23 years old son Marcel was sentenced to 20 years in a Peruvian prison. Now the father is doing everything he can in order to free his son.

The film presents artists from the Sinti and Roma minority who shape the trauma of persecution and very personal experiences in their works.

For more than eight decades, German Sinti and Roma experienced injustice. The film tells of the family of activist Romani Rose, their resistance and insistence on justice. The painful story of a minority between trauma and self-assertion. The two-part film deals with various forms of resistance by German and Austrian Sinti and Roma over eight decades. It is about rebellion against injustice and the insistence on dignity and justice.

Rolf Eden is Germany’s last playboy. As ‘king of disco’ he launched the first beauty contests popularising DJing and striptease in prudish West Germany. Father of seven children of seven different women, he has danced with the Rolling Stones and Ella Fitzgerald in his clubs. Rolf Eden is a larger than life octogenarian with long, blond hair… his girlfriend is younger than his grandchild. This unflinching conviction was essential for Eden when he, coming from a Jewish background, entered the German entertainment business of the 1950s. Leaving Israel via Paris, he returned to post war Germany to open a nightclub on West Berlin famous Boulevard Kudamm, decidedly blocking out the country’s recent dark history.

Ethnologist and adventurer, Count Eric von Rosen was a man of contradictions: interested in the natives of Africa and colonial racism. Nestler embarks on a journey in search of his grandfather.

The weather station on the Khodovarikha peninsula on the edge of the Russian Arctic Ocean in the Nenets Autonomous District is probably one of the loneliest workplaces in the world. Unimaginably the weather for our weather forecasts is measured there using the simplest of tools without any electronics. The residents are a professional soldier who has been retrained as a meteorologist and was traumatized in the Chechen war, his young wife, whose previous life in the world of cities and money was a brutal failure, a cancer-stricken pensioner who has returned to his birthplace, the aggressive, boozy head of the station with a dubious, possibly criminal past, and Jack, the dog. Five traumatized souls removed from society, who, in the solitude of the seemingly paradisiacal, hostile nature of the Arctic, try to deal with themselves, the absence of civilization, their human needs and shortcomings, and to master their lives.

Documentary about a small town in California.

Why do humans torture other humans? This is the question Frankfurt’s director Dieter Reifarth addresses in Die Tortur. Following along the lines of Jean Améry’s essay of the same name, he draws a picture of the author’s experiences of being a Nazi prisoner in the Belgian fort Breendonk. Archived footage and images from the present-day museum are shown to accompany the original audio recordings.