Karl Marx City

This short 19-minute documentary is an intimate and moving exploration of the profound and far-reaching impact of surveillance on Muslim American individuals and communities. Premiering at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, WATCHED is told through the personal experience of two women, both coming of age in New York. The film charts the devastating toll of surveillance and reveals the scars it leaves behind.

A review of 25 years of theatre work by the Berliner Ensemble, dedicated mostly to plays by Bertolt Brecht. Interviews with stage hands and lighting technicians provide an interesting view behind the scenes.

Auf der Oder

A Feature Documentary, featuring David Icke The 'mad man' who has been proved right again and again and again. David Icke has been warning for nearly 30 years of a coming global Orwellian state in which a tiny few would enslave humanity through control of finance, government, media and a military-police Gestapo overseeing 24/7 surveillance of a micro-chipped population. They called him 'crazy', 'insane', a 'lunatic', and he was subjected to decades of ridicule, dismissal and abuse. Oh, but how things change. Today his books are read all over the world and his speaking events are watched by thousands on every continent. Why? Because what he has been so derided for saying is now happening in world events and even mainstream scientists are concluding that reality is indeed a simulation. Almost every day something that David Icke said long ago is supported by happenings and evidence. As Mahatma Gandhi said: 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

To Make Sure?

Jenni has an ordinary life of simple patterns revolving around family and work. Her daily routine is seemingly unremarkable yet is of great interest to someone she doesn’t know—but who knows everything about her. Harvest is a thrilling and inventive depiction of the hidden value in mundane routines.

Do any areas of our lives escape surveillance any more? Citizens of the 21st Century are the focus of prying eyes, whether they agree to it or not.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.

Loitz is one of those former GDR towns that is a loser today. For a year "Infinite Place" looks through the eyes of old and new inhabitants behind the gray facade of a perishing small town and questions concepts of home and identity. What makes a life in the dying worthwhile?

Some things can be seen more clearly at night.. . A film poem about a continent at night, a culture on which the sun’s going down, though it’s hyper alert at the same time, an “Abendland” that, often somewhat self-obsessively, sees itself as the crown of human civilization, while its service economy is undergoing rapid growth in a thoroughly pragmatic way. Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes a look at a paradise with a quite diverse understanding of protection. Night work juxtaposed with oblivious evening digression, birth and death, questions that await answers in the semi-darkness, a Babel of languages, the routine of the daily news, and political negotiation: All this has been captured in images with a wealth of details that make us look at things in a new way. The longer you consider a word, the more distant is its return gaze: ABENDLAND.

Richard Doty is a former Air Force Intelligence operative whose job at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico involved creating and disseminating disinformation about the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft to UFO researchers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kirtland AFB was home to a wide range of highly classified technology experiments involving lasers, stealth aircraft, and nuclear weapons. Strange phenomena in the skies above the base piqued the interest of amateur and professional UFO investigators. Doty’s job was to recruit UFO researchers to be informants to the Air Force about goings-on in the UFO community and to spread military disinformation about UFOs among their peers. To accomplish this, Doty supplied fake documents to UFO investigators purporting to tell the “truth” about government involvement with extraterrestrials.

New York-based tech company Clearview AI is working to identify and compile the faces of every human being on the planet. The firm claims that its database will serve as a force for good, helping to solve crimes and prevent espionage. But what if Clearview AI’s powerful facial recognition software, that could potentially be used for mass surveillance and profiling, fell into the wrong hands? What if it already has?

THE MAZE dissects the terror-attacks since Paris Bataclan in November 2015 and looks for common patterns. Why was intelligence failing? And why keep our governments pushing for more of the same? A road movie into surveillance reforms, power, money and cover-ups. A search for a way out of this maze - with a glimpse of hope on the horizon.

NOTHING TO HIDE is an independent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the "I have nothing to hide" argument. The documentary was produced and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. It was crowdfunded by over 400 backers. NOTHING TO HIDE questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. After the emotion initially triggered by the Snowden revelations, it seems that the general public has finally accepted to live in a monitored digital world.

Dragan Wende has lived in Berlin since the '70s and has seen the city change through the years. His nephew comes to live with him as Dragan remembers the better days he lived as a Yugoslavian immigrant in a divided city.

Behind his polite exterior lies a formidable leader with a ruthless character, ready to do anything to make China the world's leading power by the People’s Republic’s centenary in 2049. This well-documented portrait of the Chinese president gives an unprecedented insight into his politics and shows how Xi Jinping's personal journey has shaped his choices as he steers China towards world domination.

Sag mir, wo du stehst

In the documentary Last To Know political prisoners, sent to jail for openly opposing the East German regime that existed until the German reunification in 1990, talk about their times of trial and their lives today. Neither they, nor their families have come to terms with what happened.

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.

In February 1986 they received the call of a fatherland that no longer exists: four young GDR citizens on the verge of adulthood see themselves forced, like so many others in East and West Germany, to do their one and a half years of military service. What is special: Their service area is the border system, an anti-imperialist protective wall according to their superiors, death strips and prison bars for a population incapacitated in naked reality. Now, seventeen years later, there is a reunion with the comrades and the old post. This feature film, which was the first in reunified Germany to deal with the inner workings of the GDR border troops, tells of life on the fence, the associated contradictions and some hot phases in the Cold War.