Sweep it Up, Again

This documentary gives a voice to organizers, DJs and party guests. Through their memories and confessions as well as unpublished videos and photos 20 years of history come back to life.

At Hotel Astoria, the former hotspot of Leipzig, guests were served champagne and turtle soup while the Stasi listened in. Animated memories from times gone by.

Kategorie C

Halali und Halleluja

The “Bowlingtreff” is a bowling alley situated right in the centre of Leipzig opened in July 1987. At that time the quality of life in Leipzig and the whole GDR got worse. Houses collapsed because of poor conditions, public life and amusement was on a very low level. The “Bowlingtreff” was not merely an urban entertainment centre but a revolution in those days. Built with the help of hundreds of volunteers without permission of the state authorities in Berlin the building expresses a free and international architecture known as postmodernism. It is an architecture that was never seen before in Leipzig. Marble and parquet on the floor, a glass roof and beautiful pink pillars. The atmosphere was western as time witnesses remember it.

Gisela involuntarily ends up studying in the cosmopolitan city of Chemnitz. There she meets her friends Jana, Fred and Meryam, with whom she spends her nights out, fights with Nazis, eventually founds the band Superbusen and, through music, hopes to find answers to all the problems life throws at her.

Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One of them is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.

A dream becomes a nightmare: Shortly after the Iranian doctor Murath Tehrani and his German wife Claudia moved into a chic villa on the outskirts of Leipzig, threatening couple flutter into the house and Claudia is harassed by anonymous callers with xenophobic slogans. First, the woman tries to hide the threat from her husband. But not even the police can help her. Suddenly, every stranger approaching the house appears as a threat. Psychological pressure is also increasing the pressure on the harmonious marriage of the young couple. But Murath and Claudia are unwilling to be driven out of their homes by aggressive racists.

Andreas Dresen's adaptation of Clemens Meyer's novel about a group of East German friends right after the fall of the Wall.

A young woman finds herself in a decaying world from which there is just one escape ...

Franziska Naumann happily greets her allegedly new neighbor Dr. Gottfried Naumann. She is very surprised when he wants to move into the same apartment in which just the movers carry their furniture. Even Gottfried is surprised - Franziska has not only the same name as he, but apparently also rented the same apartment. Without compromising, the quarreled estate agents Beate and Werner Wüstholtz has rented the apartment twice. There is only one solution: until the circumstances are clarified, the unequal couple must live together in the apartment. The fight burns.

Anne, a twenty-something student, enjoys a slow, summery day in Leipzig. While strolling through her neighbourhood she has several encounters with a stranger. At the end of the day she can't help but ask: "Do I know you?"

The Congolese Sikumoya faces prejudice and racism on a regular basis. He's accused of not adapting enough to the "German culture" and tries harder. A Neo-Nazi group and his mother-in-law push him to the breaking point. While in a coma, his metamorphosis completes.

Peter Maffay: Leipzig '90

Frank and Kamminke study informatics in Leipzig and have developed a program that enables a computer to automatically find and correct errors in its software. Freshly graduated, they are relocated to a remote Thuringian village after causing a computer breakdown. There, they are supposed to work in a small company that has no clue of economic management. The rather helpful computer system from West Germany plainly lacks compatible software. But Frank and Kamminke are not allowed to work with the hardware, although it is them who could make most out of the complex system. Eventually, and with the help of consultant Petra whom both are in love with, they break into the system control room on New Year′s Eve and start up the computer with their special program.

The pakistani hairdresser, Haroon, has immigrated illegally to Germany, the German in- surance broker, Mark, dreams of emigrating. The consequences of a car accident throw these two entirely different people together for one night. At the end of an odyssey through the alien world of illegality, they both discover that something bonds them: a desire to be far away...

Since the 1960s, each presidential election has been an opportunity for the various parties in the running to present their campaign clips on French television. Sometimes overflowing with inventiveness, more often sober, even sad, and sometimes frankly of bad taste, they remain privileged witnesses of the political history of the country. By dissecting several recent or much older videos, José Bourgarel offers through this documentary a journey into an unknown microcosm, engaged in the realization of a most delicate exercise of communication and of which he unveils on this occasion all the workings.

Part of the ,,Forty minute" series of documentaries that have nothing in common besides from their lasting time. This 1984 documentary provides a fascinating account of the lives of the former King Edward VIII and the American divorcée for whom he gave up the British throne in 1936. The Duke died in 1972 but the Duchess lived on until 1986, two years after this programme was transmitted.

From Murnau to Herzog, and until modern incarnations, a mischievous exploration of a cinematographic legendary character, with Nosferatu himself as a guide...

In New York, late 2000, my father, Michel Cohen, was charged with twenty four counts of fraud and was facing 30 years in prison. Twenty years later, I tell the story of his escape with my mother, my sister and me. Our story.