Thomas Hoepker is one of the most famous photographers of his lifetime. Now he is slowly losing his memory. He embarks on one last journey together with his wife, a trip they once took more than 50 years ago.
We all know the big bad wolf of fairy-tale fame—over hundreds of years the wolf has become a culturally imprinted symbol of fear that’s completely detached from reality. In fact there weren’t even any wolves in western Europe for a long time. But they’re back—for example in Germany, where these social animals now occupy a few scattered areas around the country that people have left to them.
The story of Thun Chay, a Cambodian who was left behind by his mother in a refugee camp during their escape from the Red Khmer and the civil war in their home country.
The Pacific Ring of Fire is home to three incredible bears: polar, brown and black. The film tells their story and takes a paw-swipe at a few bear myths.
An evening in a bar. A tangle of voices. Fragments of dialogue. The voices melt into sounds and reality becomes elusive, only to cohere again a moment later.
The global plastic crisis is dismantled and reassembled in a well-researched, cinematic film that not only points to the problems, but also to possible solutions. Probably the most important climate film of the year, with an attentive eye on greenwashing and climate racism.
A cinematic journey between places and times. About a so-called guest worker who went to Germany, and those who stayed in Greece or eventually returned there. About life in a small mountain village, family, and personal loss.
How a group of young men managed to take over the government and lead it to the brink of democracy. What drove the “Praetorians” and why almost the entire country was at their feet. Why the European public marveled and admired this.
Martina is a handicapped person. In order to be able to live her everyday life in her own home, she requires personal assistance. When Sandra starts working for her, the two of them carefully approach each other. In the extreme intimacy between the tenderness of the gestures, it is also the heaviness of the situation that emerges. It is a fragile dance between being near and being distant, that demands a lot from both of them.
“Let’s make a documentary together,” says Chrigu. “Then I will get out at some point.” This is the story of a young man who once had great plans for the future, until an advanced-stage tumour was discovered at the age of 21. Jan Gassmann follows Christian Ziörjen’s (Chrigu) fight to live, in a film less about death, but about living life. Christian himself had been making his own films since the age of 16: at parties, concerts, on a trip to India, his camera was always with him. With “Chrigu”, filmmaker Jan Gassmann succeeds in creating a moving and surprising portrait of his best friend.
Neo-fascists are chanting their slogans louder and louder in the squares and streets of Italy from north to south. The electoral victory of politician Giorgia Meloni of the right-wing Fratelli d'Italia party, whose flag bears the flame symbol in honor of Benito Mussolini, and her post-fascist government have given them a boost. A hundred years after the Duce seized power, the word fascist is becoming socially acceptable again. Among many young people in Italy, being far right is considered cool. The identitarian movement "Fortress Europe" attracts them in droves. Fascism nostalgists make pilgrimages to Mussolini's tomb and hold rallies. Right-wing rock concerts but also intellectual "meetings for tradition and identity" form the ideology. A constant support is the ultra-fan scene of the football clubs. The documentary illuminates the facets of neo-fascism in Italy, lets activists have their say, but also a journalist who has been writing about the neo-fascist scene for 20 years.
Anna and Michael reach one of the poorest nations in the world, Nepal at the height of the pandemic. Nepalese people abandoned the city to find refuge in the mountains during the lockdown where more than 8,000 end up building temporary houses to live. Anna and Michael gain new perspectives in this community of people from all across the spectrum including farmers, the homeless and mountain guides.
The pianist Kyra Steckeweh and the filmmaker Tim van Beveren search for traces where Countess Dora Pejačević (1885-1923) lived and worked. Their documentary is a journey through time to a half brilliant, half broken Europe.
"One in a Million" tells the story of two girls coming of age. As gymnast and YouTuber Whitney Bjerken from the US struggles with setbacks, she turns to music to express her feelings. Yara from Germany is one of her biggest fans and part of a show-acrobatics team. When she falls in love with a girl for the very first time, she barely finds time for her fan-account anymore. While navigating the exciting world of social media, Yara and Whitney begin to find out who they are and what they want in life.
A year that changed a city - and the world - forever. Hitler's rise to power, told through the letters and diaries of those who lived through a fateful turning point in history.
Tage is not a memoir of Schreiner's battle with his illness – this is merely hinted at, almost obliquely. Schreiner considered his ailing body above all an artistic challenge: What is possible, what can be developed from the set of options and perspectives such a state of being offers? Curiously enough, Tage turned into a variation of his last finished film, Garten (2019): a chamber piece shot almost exclusively in his house, featuring himself and his beloved wife Maria as well as some friends. It is also a return to a cinema of intimacy that he'd last essayed with Kinderfilm (1985). With all of that, Schreiner strove for and reached yet another level of artistic freedom with Tage, for none of his works to date are as light-footed in their movement: pure stream-of-conscious in a diaristic framework – a film as open as Schreiner's restlessly searching soul and endlessly curious heart.
Contemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architecture and its intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with an alternately mournful and sly treatise on how the presence—and, in some cases, absence—of municipal and communal building architecture is inseparable from capitalist ideology. Focusing mainly on cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia, Emigholz’s latest film is a work of quiet observation and historical excavation. From slaughterhouses in Salamone to the flooded former spa city of Epecuén to the newly built Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the film demonstrates the effect of capital on public spaces, where creation and destruction go hand in hand, and as always, Emigholz makes the journey one of intellectual force and cinematic beauty.
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