Einmal Hooligan - immer Hooligan?

The original Tresor was in many ways the quintessential Berlin club: located in an unrenovated vault beneath a bombed out department store, it opened its doors amidst the general confusion and ecstasy that swept across the city when the wall fell. Its low ceilings, industrial decor and generally unhinged atmosphere created an unprecedented platform not only for techno in Berlin, but also for the scene taking shape across the Atlantic in Detroit.

In 2019, Union Berlin was promoted to the Bundesliga. Four years later, the traditional East German club qualifies for the Champions League and achieves something that few would have thought possible. Despite all the euphoria over the triumph, the pressure to remain strong in sporting and economic terms also increased, as did the fear of falling into a conflict of identity between tradition and change. The fact that the soccer underdog from Köpenick still manages to retain its magic is primarily down to the people who work behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly and enthusiastically. Always at their side: a loyal fan base that is prepared to follow their club's path unconditionally. Hendel follows the team behind Union for almost two years, right up to their entry into the top flight, and takes a unique, particularly personal and authentic look behind the scenes of the club.

A documentary about the Celts, the fans of the Bilogorac football club from the Croatian village of Veliko Trojstvo. Interestingly, the members are not locals, but people from Bjelovar, a city 10 kilometers away that has a much better ranked football team. Dressed in green and white, the Celts spend every weekend escaping from provincial life to support the players.

In this documentary Angela Zumpe searches for traces of her brother, who moved from west to east Germany in 1968 to live in the DDR but killed himself eight months after.

A film about three teenagers - Klara, Mina and Tanutscha - from the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. The trio have known each other since Kindergarten and have plenty in common. The three 15-year-olds are the best of friends; they are spending the summer at Prinzenbad, a large open-air swimming pool at the heart of the district where they live. They're feeling pretty grown up, and are convinced they've now left their childhood behind.

The story of the legendary Berlin club and its founder, a woman whose life is inextricably interwoven with the bright and dark sides of a hedonistic lifestyle.

Criminal Minded: Live at the Crime Scene

Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany’s most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists – in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.

The documentary BERLINIZED describes this very Berlin-specific attitude in a reflection on and a journey to mid-1990s' Berlin. Filmmaker Lucian Busse, an active protagonist of the period, documents the transformation of Berlin after the Wall. But Berlinized represents more than just the 1990s - it is a metaphor for this virally catching creative feeling, the slightly rough directness, spiced up with a big dash of typical Berlin humor. Berlinized lets the former protagonists reflect how that temporary feeling of freedom shaped their individual lives, and to what degree that freedom can still be found among the neat order of today's Berlin. These reflections are as diverse as the interviewees and as multifaceted as the changes in those times.

"plant portals: breath" is an experimental meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry daily, connecting bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes and the complicated concept of "rest" to ask: Can nature heal us? Shot entirely on an iPhone, the film is intentional in imagining what is possible, and manifests a reality rooted in mindfulness.“

Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

A documentary exploring a crime that shocked Germany in the summer of 1999.

Klassenleben

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.

Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker take a powerfully personal journey through the former East Germany, as Epperlein investigates her father’s 1999 suicide and the possibility that he may have worked as a spy for the dreaded Stasi security service.

Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.

A taxi drives through the city of Berlin. Its driver is a punk, left and a well-known figure in the autonomous scene. The stations of his trip are the most important places of the autonomous scene: all in the struggle for survival. The last evictions have not yet been processed and the next ones are coming right up.

Der verborgene Schatz - Die legendäre Kunstsammlung des Iran