Former "Titanic" satire magazine editor Martin Sonneborn takes an undercover trip around Berlin and discovers the East-German mentality and what is left of the socialist German Democratic Republic.
Documentary about the social microcosm of Hasenheide, a 50 hectar green area in Berlin, located between Kreuzberg and Neukölln. In this park, you'll find old women with their dogs, young football players, Turks at the barbecue, as well as nudists. For the residents, Hasenheide is sports area, living room, pub and runway all at once. A refutation of the media panic surrounding the park as a place of drug dealing and violence.
Der gordische Knoten
The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.
The film chronicles the story of how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual benefit, a small sports event into the modern Olympics. The grand themes and controversial issues from the 1936 Games have continued to this day: Monumentality, budget overruns, collusion with authoritarian regimes, corruption and sometimes even bribery.
Commissioned by the Berliner Landesbildarchiv, this movie shows countless impressions of (West) Berlin everyday life, accentuated with self-ironic commentary.
Berlin queer community members mourn the substance abuse-related loss of their friends by sharing memories and rituals. Resembling glow-in-the-dark fungi, they radiate light together as a network of support and care.
Criminal Minded: Live at the Crime Scene
Born in Germany in 2002, Noa Blanche Beschorner evokes the memory of those who, a generation before her, lived through the separation of East and West Germany. Tapetenwechsel (Change of Scenery) is the story of youth seeking their identity when confronting their collective memory.
A documentary about Berlin's former airport Tempelhof. A film about Departures and Arrivals. And about those Berliners who come here to escape from their daily lives and those refugees who came here to finally arrive somewhere.
The film shines a light onto federal chancellor Angela Merkel and her now ending 16-year-long tenure. An era, not an episode. And a vagarious relationship history between the chancellor and the Germans. Who has changed whom here?
Mona is a 22 year old trans girl from a small village in France. She puts needles attached to peacock feathers in her skin, under bright lights, late at night. She bleeds, half naked, in front of small crowds of people. Sometimes they faint whilst watching her. Why would she do this? How did she learn to do it? And why would someone want to watch?
The film shows courtyards in the old Berlin city center that were designed by the residents themselves before the reconstruction. The painter Reinhard Zabka, himself the initiator and protagonist of such actions, talks about his relationship to art and his understanding of its function in the big city. Residents talk about their experiences.
Artists, urban planners and the city of Berlin trying to transform a former GDR ruin into a place for new visions and concepts of city - a place where everything is different than before?
A documentary produced by the French armed forces which chronicles the way of France’s “1ere armée” in the second world war from the days it first crossed the Rhine in March of 1945, through the liberation of a POW-camp in Swabia, until the forces reached the Danube and the Alps at the end of the war and the day French troops marched in the victory parade in Berlin.
After the last train at night and before the first in the morning, 800 people are hard at work behind the scenes making London's Underground fit to travel on. Including brushing dust from ventilation ducts, ‘fluffers’ cleaning up rubbish, routine rail replacement and fixing a broken rail discovered at 3.30am.
A documentary essay film about coincidences, shattered lives and posthumous fame. A found footage family film about love and passion, friendship and heartbreak in Berlin between the wars. But a film also about self-sufficiency and recycling, about the green movement and the environment – before these notions had yet been properly invented. And it touches the utopian potential of ideas that have lain buried in the ground of an island for the past 70 years. The film’s protagonist, Martin Elsaesser, was one of the most prominent modernist architects of Weimar Germany.
Documentary made for Dutch television about Nick Cave in Berlin in 1987.
UNLIKE U melts into a scene, which for outsiders, is hard to comprehend. The world of trainwriters, those spray paint artists who specialize in painting trams and underground trains. Extremely undercover. Extremely criminal. Extremely forbidden. UNLIKE U portrais four generations of sprayers in Berlin, of which the oldest of the hardcore artists is already over 40 years old, while the youngest are around 17. All protagonists have one thing in common. Each one has sprayed countless trains in their lives, some of them even over a 1000.
Rare documentary footage from around 1900 depicts the mood of life in Berlin at the turn of the century.