Film- und Medienstiftung NRW

A young girl from London moves to Africa with her parents where she befriends a lion cub.

Flo and his trusted Collie pal Lassie spend the summer at Aunt Cosma's, alongside her foster children Kleo and Henry, and her dog Pippa. When local canines start disappearing, including Pippa, Lassie rallies the kids to solve the mystery.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

Vampire sisters Silvania and Daka try to rescue their baby brother, a half-vampire, from the clutches of the evil vampire queen Antanasia, who wants to crown him as her heir.

The lives of three strong-willed women and a young musician cross paths in Tehran’s schizophrenic society where sex, adultery, corruption, prostitution and drugs coexist with strict religious law. In this bustling modern metropolis, avoiding prohibition has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation.

A 9th century woman of English extraction born in the German city of Ingelheim disguises herself as a man and rises through the Vatican ranks.

Oleg is a young gifted paramedic. His wife Katya works as a nurse at the hospital emergency department. She loves Oleg, but is fed up with him caring more about patients than her. She tells him she wants a divorce. The new head of Oleg’s EMA department is a cold-hearted manager who’s got new strict rules to implement. Oleg couldn’t care less about the rules – he’s got lives to save; his attitude gets him in trouble with the new boss. The crisis at work coincides with the personal life crisis. Caught up between their patients, alcohol-fueled off-shifts, and an evolving health care system, Oleg and Katya have to find the binding force that will keep them together.

Zenia is an industrious Ukrainian migrant worker in Poland who makes house calls as a masseur to the needy and aspirational residents of a middle-class gated community near Warsaw. He is privy to all of their problems, anxieties and secrets – and something of an unwitting guru figure. Zenia’s grounded spirituality, apparent healing powers and broad shoulders make him an object of lust for many of the lost souls in the community.

In 2015, thirty year old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat that illegally crossed the Mediterranean, is drawn into Berlin's seedy underbelly.

Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

Mariano, 16, inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice and improbably survives. Then, life goes on. His brother pursues a romance with a girl working at a fast-food joint, his mother takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a woman to join his medieval wind ensemble.

Alma’s family has been producing quality olive oil in the Baix Maestrat area of Spain’s Castellón for generations. Yet changing pressures in the industry have made their traditional practices economically untenable, and the family is now in the mass-production poultry business. Alma’s grandfather has not spoken in years. Sadness envelopes him, and he no longer wants to eat. His sons—Alma’s father and uncle—are impatient with him, but Alma understands her grandfather. She realizes he has been grieving for a thousand-year-old olive tree that the family has uprooted and sold to pay some debts. (A sadly common reality in Castellón at present.) Unable to bear the idea that her grandfather could die without seeing this terrible wrong corrected, Alma undertakes a quixotic mission to locate the tree and return it to the family orchard, so that her grandfather may have peace in his final days.

Through a magical coincidence, the ambitious career woman Rebecca and the lively musical actress Maja switch bodies and have to find their way in each other's lives. What begins as a strange dilemma soon teaches them important life lessons.

At age 19, Stratos committed a crime of passion. He spent half his life in prison, where underground boss Leonidas took him under his wing. One day during a rival gang attack, Leonidas saved his life. Stratos never forgot this. A free man now, Stratos works the night shift at a bakery workshop, a far cry from the killing contracts he executes by day. He gives away all his money to spring Leonidas out of prison, funding an escape plan managed by Leo’s brother, Yorgos. The fulfillment of his debt is the only thing that matters to Stratos, everything else is indifferent and he lives detached, surrounded by ghosts and fallacies. The day of the escape, the most important day of his life, is near…

Karl Escher, the son of a prominent banker, was accused of embezzlement and forgery at the bank and went to prison for three years. After his release, he seeks revenge against his brother Franz, whom he believes to be the real culprit.

In EVOLUTION, acclaimed filmmaking team Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber (PIECES OF A WOMAN) return with a powerful drama tracing three generations of a family, from a surreal memory of World War II to modern day Berlin, unable to process their past in a society still coping with the wounds of its history. Like the water that connects the episodes in this triptych, memory and identity are fluid, and how we relate to it can drown or buoy. The pain and stigma that trickles from Eva, to Lena and then Jonas is inexpressible, yet rendered with striking imagery by Mundruczó and a wrenchingly poignant yet acerbically ironic and personal script by Weber. While generational traumas find new expression in the present, the family in EVOLUTION looks towards a more hopeful future

On the outskirts of the capital of Chad, determined single mother Amina works tirelessly to provide for herself and her 15-year old daughter Maria. When Amina discovers Maria is pregnant and does not want a child, the two women begin to seek out an abortion, condemned by both religion and law. In the process, mother and daughter forge a connection stronger than any they’ve ever known.

easy love is the experimental fiction debut of Tamer Jandali. His way of working shifted between documentary and fiction when he followed seven men and women from Cologne on their search for a balance between emotional security and sensual fulfillment. In four months of shooting those protagonists acted as braver versions of themselves. The camera opened the possibility to pursue their unlived dreams, fears and fantasies and ultimately experiencing them in reality. By shooting in a small team, always on the edge between documentary and fiction, Tamer Jandali created space for intimacy and a new form of cinematic authenticity.

During her internship in a remote clinic in the Allgäu region, the young psychology student Lea immerses herself in a mysterious world of unorthodox therapy methods and demonic traditions.

After the death of her husband, silence and loneliness reign in this old lady's house. She made routine her best friend and faith her shelter. Only in her dreams she runs away from those four walls to a timeless magic land where the sea speaks without using words. Her days go by like this; between the real life and dreams… until a street dog comes to her door.