Peter Nestler's poetic documentary Verteidigung der Zeit is not only an hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), but also to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work,...
A short pamphlet based on a text by Peter Weiss and on the contrapuntal use of the relation between image and sound. The commercial activities and fantasies linked to tourism in Sweden are contradicted by the geopolitics of capitalist imperialism, in particular with the war in Vietnam.
The first part of this film is devoted to the Greek resistance against fascism and the civil war for independence. While the voice-over recites facts and names, photos take us into the past and the everyday lives of the people. The second part takes us to Greece in 1965, where the masses are...
This work produced by Swedish television, where Swedish kids reads texts written by Japanese kids about their experiencing of and surviving the bombings. In the film we see images/drawings painted by these children. Nestlers inspiration comes from the book Children of the A Bomb "Five years after...
Jewish painter Leopold Mayer fled his native Frankfurt at the rise of the Nazi regime. Although briefly finding refuge in France, where he changed his name to Leo Maillet, his stay was cut short by Germany's invasion of Paris. Flucht traces Maillet's escape from the Gestapo and the French police,...
In a 13-minute navigation, Nestler takes us downstream the Rhine River. The opportunity of cheap water transport kept prices of raw material down and made the Rhine one of the most important arteries of industrial transport in the world.
The revolt at Sobibór extermination camp in October 1943 is a central episode of resistance against national socialism. Thomas «Toivi» Blatt, son of a Jewish businessman, was 15 when he was deported to Sobibór. Blatt was among those who managed to escape during the uprising only to find his...
In the 1970s, Peter and his wife, Zsóka Nestler, collaborated on a series of educational films for television that focused on craft-making. These “biographies of objects” are rigorous investigations into the history of working techniques, production processes, and materials.
Portrait of a small south German village and its residents in the early sixties. Rural culture is undergoing a transformation caused by the intrusion of the industrial world. Gestures at work and words of its inhabitants.
Roma and Sinti people talk about their experiences in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany, inspired by Otto Pankok’s paintings of Romani theme and subject in the 1930s, declared degenerate art by the Nazis. These are moving narratives of persecution, discrimination,...
How to Make Glass (Mechanically) is part of a series of educational films for television intended for young audiences. Directed by Peter and Zsóka Nestler, the series was dedicated to the history and processes behind the making of objects (paper, printing books, fabrics and so on), highlighting...
Filmed in Spain, Finland, Sweden, and West Germany, 'Spanien!' investigates ideas of internationalism and solidarity, using personal testimonies from former members of the International Brigades who joined the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and from members of the Workers’...
“This film is about the indigenous cultures of Ecuador, of what is past and what is preserved, of destruction and resistance, of persisting in new ways, of music in the villages high up in the Andes, of music in the cities and in a tropical climate among descendants of African slaves. The film is...
