From the Sideline

Meet the growing, worldwide community of theorists who defend the belief that the Earth is flat while living in a society who vehemently rejects it.

Berlin‘s past and future through the eye of an outsider - nothing but the naked truth by someone being torn apart by life and longing.

It had been 50 years since two Avro Lancaster bombers flew side by side. The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum's Avro Lancaster, VeRA, flew from Hamilton, Ontario to meet her British counterpart, Thumper - the only other surviving flight worthy Lancaster bomber in the world - the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's (BBMF) Lancaster in England. This documentary includes first-hand accounts from the men and women who experienced the war and were connected to the Lancaster. It transports the viewer back in time as they share what it was like during the Lancaster's glory days. REUNION OF GIANTS documents this historic mission as it unfolds through the eyes of the flight crews, veterans, friends and family. It includes all parts in this new chapter of the bomber's history, as VeRA crosses the Atlantic.

Volker Koepp documents life in the Dorotheenstadt in Berlin-Mitte, which was called "Feuerland" in the 19th century.

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.

Ein Tag in Berlin

25 years after the reunion between East and West Germany, this movie shows pictures from different perspectives of people and country, during a glide flight above the metropolis. Which visions and dreams marked this region? What changed and what emerged from the city’s contentious history? We take a look from above to see the city and its citizens.

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.

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.

Spanning over 2,000 years, this study looks at the complex relationship between Jewish and Catholic thought from a social and historical perspective. Examining different significant moments for both religions throughout the centuries, this commentary on the book analyzes and explains the conflicts that have arisen between the two religions since their beginnings.

Sigmund Freud - L'invention de la psychanalyse

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.

The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped and later murdered by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the original leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.

Around six to 15 percent of all people (study by John Hearst 2011) hear voices at some point in their lives. Many of them even live with their invisible companions for their entire lives. Well over half of voice hearers are mentally healthy and lead a completely unremarkable life. Despite this, voice hearers continue to be stigmatized and are subject to prejudice. As a result, few speak openly about their experiences. In recent decades in particular, however, voice hearing has been regarded as a symptom of impaired brain function. The documentary sheds light on the phenomenon. Sufferers describe the voices in their heads, as well as the thoughts and feelings they trigger in them, and scientists explain the causes that lead people to hear voices.

‘I compulsively picked up the camera when I filed a complaint against Olivier. I never thought I'd ask myself one day: what happened to my body? And who knew?’ In a cinematic gesture that is both intimate and political, This Is My Body examines the micro-stories that make up rape culture, memory as an unfathomable drawer.

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

In the three years leading up to the Olympics, the Nazi regime saw sport as an invaluable mobilisation and propaganda tool to motivate the "master race". Whether sympathisers or followers, German athletes went along with it; however, a number of them came to regret their decisions.

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

This short film shows how the war department utilizes a Ph.D., a chimp, and three dogs to help design aptitude tests for men applying for work.

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.