In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel - highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns - satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for...
Project manager Kevin returns to his childhood on the island of Sylt on a vacation with his daughter, motivated by closing a big deal there, since his company plans to build luxury apartments on a piece of land.
A documentary about the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall which makes no use of vocal commentary but instead focuses on visual elements. From the Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate, the camera captures the historic events from all sides and different angles: on the one hand there are news...
Seven directors remember their childhood and youth; to the 50s and 60s in the GDR. They appear to be curious, vulnerable children and teenagers who also want to be cool (even though the word doesn't exist for them yet). They live in well-adjusted or resistant families. Some only in half because...
Director Annekatrin Hendel delivers a portrait of three generations of Brasches as a microcosm of societal tensions being carried out on a large scale — between East and West, art and politics, communism and religion, love and betrayal, utopia and self-destruction.
Potter's Bull is the first part of the "Over-Paintings" Trilogy (Uebermalungen) by painter and director STRAWALDE (Juergen Boettcher). Paulus Potter's simple postcard scene entitled "The Young Bull" ("den jungen Stier") is artistically alienated in an imposing fashion. By using assorted means of...
Two men sit on the top of a roof, playing the tuba. They continually call out absurd messages making fun of official solutions and of their own slogans. The residents feel disturbed by the tuba's sound and start to attack the musicians, while they themselves keep on playing and shouting louder and...
This film portraits the artist and model-builder Hermann Gloeckner, who was born in Dresden in 1889. Even at the age of 96 he is still drawing with undiminished creative energy.
In the west of Ukraine, not far from the border to Romania, there is a faraway European city: Chernivtsi. It was once the centre of Jewish culture in the Bukowina, a border area characterized over centuries by a multi-cultural mixture of peoples. Here, Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Germans and Jews...
Only two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in January 1990, almost two hundred controversial East German visual and performance artists—including Jürgen Böttcher, the Autoperforation Artists, AG Geige, Via Lewandowsky, Trak Wendisch, Conny Hege, Klaus Killisch, Helga Paris and Hanns...
Venus after Giorgione is the the second part of the "Over Paintings" (Uebermalungen) trilogy by painter and director STRAWALDE (Juergen Boettcher). Using various methods of "painting over" or projecting on top of Giorgione's "Sleeping Venus," Boettcher alienates the work artistically. Venus' beauty...
Documentary filmmaker Paul Krewer follows his friend Thomas Ritter in the Peace Race, aiming to capture a winner’s story. When Ritter crashes and falls back, Krewer shifts focus to underdog Steve Baxter’s grit and teammate Falck’s unexpected lead. In a dramatic final stage, Ritter stages a...
At the Vienna Art Academy in 1994, an unidentified person painted over 27 works by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer. Rainer had become world-famous for his abstract art and, in particular, for his over-layering of photographs and overpainting of his own and other artists’ works. But who painted...
Volker Koepp revisits Zehdenick and Grüneberg, East Germany. People are struggling with the new political and economical conditions shortly before the German Reunification.
The film shows the concentrated faces of a brigade of women above the microscopes, the sudden bursts of laughter, the familiar conversations during work breaks. Then Sylvia with the pretty face, who is too fat and also handicapped by a hip condition, tells us how she imagines her husband: He should...
