Shot in a neo-expressionist style, the film is a satire on cults of any kind. The plot follows Frankie and Hannes, a young gay couple living in Berlin. One is studying art and the other medicine. Their happy life is disrupted when Frankie attends a lecture and quickly becomes involved in a sinister...
On the occasion of the 30th birthday of the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, founded in 1966. Graduate Barbara Teufel accompanies a camera seminar led by director Elfi Mikesch. The students are to produce three short films on the subject of blindness with "real" blind people. Absurd, you...
Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan’s Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years...
Rosa von Praunheim, the director of the film, parodies himself and his time as a professor at the Film School in Potsdam Babelsberg, where he taught for six years.
Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.
A woman reflects on her romantic relationship with a young moroccan years ago. Her daughter travels to Morocco, attempting to relive her mother's past.
A young woman is fed up with the usual consumer's television and begins to make her own television, or more correctly, closevision. She is now a reporter who wanders around Berlin with her camera and 'telecasting apparatus' on her back. Her livingroom has been transformed into a studio and here the...
This film tells the story of Markus Anatol Weisse, who, astonishingly enough, became an artist, in spite of being only very partially sighted. Markus also builds strange machine-like beings and wishes that he himself were a biological robot, or cyborg.
Documentary filmmaking: Christoph Hübner talks with Elfi Mikesch
02000HD
The cinematographer and idiosyncratic filmmaker Elfi Mikesch has significantly contributed to the extension of the aesthetic boundaries of the "standard" documentary.
A documentary film showing life in one of Hamburg’s homes for seniors. Over the course of six months, Elfi Mikesch interviewed and filmed the inhabitants, concentrating on a female couple who are spending the rest of their lives together in a close and intimate relationship.
60 years after the holocaust, director Peter Lilienthal, himself a victim and refugee of the Nazi regime, sheds a light on jewish life in Germany in the early 2000s.