Fünferfilm

The project is inspired by the director’s own youth during his time at a boarding school in southern Germany. Presents the dilemmas of adolescence between cravings to belong to the group and thirst for freedom.

Tells the story of mushroom pickers who, in the summer and autumn months head, to the southern Carpathians of Romania to begin their search. Far from being a leisure activity, for many of the pickers this is a main source of income which they and their families rely on to get by. In makeshift campsites, they spend months between dense coniferous forests and the Transalpina road, where they sell the gathered mushrooms to passing tourists or people on weekend breaks. The majority of their harvest is taken by intermediaries, who sell the mushrooms abroad for many times the price.

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.

Ida lives on a sailing yacht with a crew of five men. While on shore leave in Marseilles, she becomes fascinated with the French Foreign Legion and decides to sail to Sidi Bel Abbès, the Legion's former headquarters in Algeria.

In south-western Texas, elongated mountain ranges, broad valleys, prairies and deserts pass by. At the Bottom of the Sea explores this imposing landscape and its many meanings, starting with its timeless beauty that has inspired many painters. Once, this part of the earth's crust was part of the ocean floor; the compressed skeletons of billions of sea creatures are now mined as limestone.