By exploring the relationship between the watched and the watching, our film uncovers the trauma and hope engendered by the Chinese all-surveilling state and lends a voice to those that stand in resilient defiance of such blatant abuse of power.
Documentary about Svetlana Geier, a Ukranian who has translated the great works of Dostoyevsky into German. First her father ends up in one of Stalin's prison camps, then young Svetlana herself experiences the German invasion. In order to survive she learns German at home in Kiev. She is good and...
Louis-Ferdinand Céline described the period he spent in Sigmaringen in his delirious and infernal novel, Castle to Castle, published in 1957. The last months before the German “moment of truth”, as they’ve never been portrayed before: Documented in delirious reality. A documentary film based...
The film tells a very personal story from two perspectives: our protagonist is both doctor and patient. As a patient, he has struggled with recurring depression for years, and as a doctor he wants to find out why. The search for the origins of his illness leads him into the realm of his own genes...
Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the...
Love & Engineering is for everyone who has experienced uncertainty, had a crush on someone or been on a date. The film asks what are our so-called “feelings” and can we can control them or not. Challenges of the dating world are approached through the perspective of male engineers: how to...
They live on the edge of the known world - far from civilization but affected by its consequences nonetheless. The photographer Markus Mauthe visited these last indigenous peoples to capture the inherent beauty of their cultures, before they too fall victim to ever-advancing globalisation. The...
A humorous observation in Barcelona’s immigrant neighbourhood El Raval. Four barber shops, four places of remembrance, strange time and space capsules inhabited by people who left their home to find a better one, while the Spaniards are about to leave their own country themselves.
Bugarach. Nothing ever really happens in this bucolic village in Southern France at the base of the mountain that gives it its name. But the villagers' peace and quiet vanishes when the news story circulates around the globe like a viral video that this close-knit community of 194 inhabitants will...
In Seda, a remote peat miners' town in Latvia, time seems to be frozen in the Soviet era. Built in 1952 and inhabited by a multi-ethnic workforce from different parts of the former USSR, it still preserves intact the inflated style of a Stalinist "shock work" construction project. Culturally Seda's...
Unfulfilled dreams, expectations and competition in the closely interwoven relationships between a mother and her two daughters. Observations of a fragile triangular relationship in an icy microcosm.
After the destructions that where caused by the tsunami, the insulars of an Indian archipelago are rolled over by another surge of ruination: the flood of international aid organizations, which pluck this premodern civilisation into the 21st century. The film depicts the partially heroic attempts...
The sirens blare out; a catastrophe is rehearsed. Hyperreal practice-runs, planning exercises and simulations give rise to the disturbing dystopia of emergency. The film of the hour: thrilling, complex and alarming.
Protagonis Alfred D. travels around the world to help people develop themselves and their countries. Just before he gets lost on one of his trips to Antarctica, a friend of his receives a box full of video tapes from Alfred's travels and recreates his life on film.
When Jan Peters' girlfriend accidentally takes his wallet on a trip to foreign climes, she leaves the filmmaker standing in Frankfurt Airport without a penny to his name. The only capital he possesses is a group ticket for the public transport system. After hearing about people who supplement their...
For a hundred years, the former fishing village of Campione d'Italia, an Italian enclave in Switzerland, has drawn enormous wealth from a monumental casino. There is hardly a resident who has not benefited economically or socially from it. But the bankruptcy of this colossus destroys all prospects...
