When Michael was released from the Jugendwerkhof at the age of 16, he said: "... There has to be controversy to make progress, to achieve something in life, to be a human being at all." Three years later, the movie tries to find out what has become of him.
The story of Paris-based Palestinian painter Samir Salameh.
In interviews, several important GDR personalities and also GDR citizens comment on the events of October 1989.
Short film about foreign affairs
Rainer Burmeister (director) tells a story about everyday working life of 46 young Mozambican people in the GDR who were employed as contract workers. Among them is 20-year-old Luisa, who worked in the mining industry and, like the others, is now training to be a craftswoman.
A Little Boy in the ruins of World War II and the white lie of an old man - after a story by Wolfgang Borchert.
This portrait shows Black cartoonist Oliver Harrington from New York, who fled to the GDR. For his political drawings, he drew on worldly anecdotes and his love of storytelling. Director Hans Hattop later taught videography at the University of Film and Television.
Documentary short about Husemannstraße in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg.
Paul Celan’s poem echoes. A drive reveals a long-abandoned Gründerzeit villa in ruin. Inside, a woman in elegant WWI attire dances, then slumps in mourning. After the war she cleans, reappears in 1930s riding clothes amid radio discontent as a maid and housekeeper move through the halls. Mourning returns with WWII’s end. Post-war, she dances to American rhythms, breastfeeds under Soviet-occupation broadcasts. Beatles and Pink Floyd play as a woman in overalls emerges, memories of the century flooding her mind. She climbs into a Trabant Kübel, helmet beside her, determined to give the villa a new life.
Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg: Children are playing and climbing all over the monument to Käthe Kollwitz, frowning adults are watching them. What would Gustav Seitz, the creator of the sculpture, say? Christa Mühl has asked him but reveals his answer only when the adults have finally disappeared. Until then, she constructs explosive matter as light as a feather, set to Belgian cembalo jazz and with the perky montage style that characterises her early documentary work. After Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler himself had the most controversial scene cut, the film could be broadcast on television and triggered a lively discussion about the practical value of art.
17-year-old Ramona comes from a home in Berlin to a small village and introduces herself as the baker's daughter. Neither of them knew anything about each other. Laconic images of the dreariness of the East German provinces show the excessive demands on the long-married baker and the mutual speechlessness of daughter and father.
An adaptation based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Andrees’ graduation project approaches the perky 14-year-old Jacki mainly through her social environment: the stressed patchwork family mother, the solitary long-distance truck driver father, the eclectic neighbourhood. The closer the film gets to its protagonists, the freer the movements of the camera become, gliding through a studio as if in a trance or flying over the nocturnal motorway as if over a UFO landing strip.
