Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB)

In the 15th century, a young goatherd living alone in a mountain hut feels a dark presence in the woods.

In the Georgian riverside town of Kutaisi, summertime romance and World Cup fever are in the air. After a pair of chance encounters, pharmacist Lisa and soccer player Giorgi find their plans for a date undone when they both awaken magically transformed with no way to recognize each other.

Martin leaves his protective parents’ home and comes to Berlin as a law student with high hopes. He finds a tiny, run-down flat in a strange, dark apartment block, from which the previous tenant has disappeared without a trace. Having no luck with social contacts at the university, Martin quickly falls for his mysterious landlady Simone, who lives just next door behind a thin wall. Hoping to find trust and intimacy, Martin loses himself in the house’s disturbing world of sex and violence. Deep in the walls, Martin discovers the true horror of his first love.

After many years apart, Emilie meets her brother Jakob again. She not only shares her sadness about the loss of their parents with him, but also a secret...

Jakob, a young policeman from a remote village, has his world unhinged when a stranger in a dress emerges from the forest and begins killing villagers with a sword.

Real estate agent Christian travels the countryside scouting for investment prospects. In a forgotten, seemingly abandoned village far off the main roads, he finds more than he is looking for. Getting entangled in an encounter with a taciturn teenage farmhand, he confronts his sexual frustrations and, in the process, gets drawn into the undergrowth of a bloodthirsty rustic community.

When Martin, a former GDR citizen, is released from jail, he lately becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.

The story of a seemingly settled bank employee who breaks the shackles of his everyday life and becomes a wanderer between worlds. Frederik is an up-and-coming young bank employee who lives an ordinary life. When a bank customer, whom Frederik has denied a loan in the face of the bank crisis, shoots himself in front of Frederik, he snaps. Together with ex-con Vince,he begins to live out a new, dark side of himself. He robs his rich bank customers' homes and gives the money to the needy. The initial rush of crossing social boundaries soon develops into an addiction to ever greater thrills.

A depiction of the Wrangelkiez neighbourhood in Berlin. The people portrayed tell their life stories. One woman came to the neighbourhood a decade ago to work in Berlin’s still unfinished Brandenburger Airport, one man reminisces his childhood on a Tobacco farm in Kentucky, another speaks of an exceptional day in an otherwise monotonous workplace. These portraits are interwoven with the story of Elpi, a Greek woman who is waiting for the long overdue visit of an old important friend. The outcome of this mixture is a film which captures the lives and perspectives of some of Wrangelkiez’s most commanding citizens, while at the same time evoking the loss that change and time passing means for places and for people.

17-year old Sarah, filled with adolescent angst, is an extreme person who in her rehearsals with a theatre group is transformed until she is almost in a trance, and her performances at home or elsewhere verge on excess. A cold, intellectual father, a timid mother, a younger sister and an older brother who has left home complete the picture: a silent time bomb.

Haunted by dreams of her family's bull, a woman living in Berlin returns after many years to her hometown in Venezuela to visit her father and settle old scores with her siblings.

An accidental meeting in an elevator at a department store leads two older women to their limits and forces them to improvise by the time the elevator gets stuck.

A film inspired by one of Germany's most visited blogs. The author of the site www.notesofberlin.com, Joab Nist, posts pictures of real announcements, notes, information that people leave in the streets of Berlin. The film follows 15 genuine notes and protagonists. The result is 15 funny, tragic, fascinating episodes about people and the city they live in. Twenty-four hours from the life of the city. The story begins with a note attached to a street lamp, with the message “For one minute please just stand here in silence, look at the sky and contemplate how amazing life is”. Is it possible that only a very drunk young man notices the text and looks upwards? An extraordinary mood picture of present-day Berlin and a declaration of love for the city.

A girl roams through the city looking for a place to sleep. Along the way she meets young mothers who celebrate motherhood religiously, goes home with an abstinent existentialist for whom sex is “just another market”, and waits for the end of capitalism in a drag bar. Her attempt to write a book doesn’t make it beyond the first sentence of the second chapter, and she finds no space between art galleries, yoga studios and the beds of strangers. Instead of trying to fit in, she starts regarding her depression as a political issue.

Gerd Conradt films men carrying a red flag in a relay race through Berlin, to hoist it on the balcony of the current Mayor’s seat. A cinematic experiment based on Eadweard Muybridge, Andy Warhol and New American Cinema. A study in men, movements and a symbol. This is the 7th part of this series of film exercises. The other 6 parts were staged by Harun Farocki (Part 1), Carlos Bustamante (Part 2), Helke Sander (Part 3), Holger Meins (Part 4), Wolfgang Petersen (Part 5), Philip Werner Sauber (Part 6).

Elena is a student in Minsk. She is having an intense but self-destructive love affair with Viktor. When Elena's father goes to prison she has to take charge of his business dealings to help him. She drives repeatedly into the restricted zone at Chernobyl, behind the wheel of a truck, in order to smuggle contaminated steel. The conflicts with Viktor escalate, and Elena is increasingly captivated by the zone's deceptive beauty...

Alma and Jan are having an affair and yet Jan does not want to admit it. In order to force him to recognize their relationship, Alma secretly takes Jan's small son, Juri on a trip. Accompanied by the delivery man Bruno, the two drive in the direction of Berlin. At a rest stop, he tries clumsily to get closer to Alma but she rebuffs him. In doing so, Alma unwittingly injures him in such a way that he drops all his inhibitions. Whereas Bruno until now was acting covertly in the hope of establishing contact, he now wants to take for himself what has been denied him.