FEATHERED COCAINE is not a wildlife documentary. It is a documentary about the international trade of falcons. After the trade of drugs, people and weapons, smuggling falcons is ranked No 4 in the list of the most profitable illegal trades. Most people are not aware that the effects of the falcon trade has exerted huge influence over thousands of years on politics, economy and society all around the world. FEATHERED COCAINE reveals in an investigative way the contexts between the trade of falcons and historical events, where royal dynasties, institutions like the CIA and the KGB, the oil industry and Al Queda were involved. This documentary was filmed and released shortly before the 'supposed' execution of Osama bin Laden, who CIA Operative Alan Parrot & his Team had met with 6 times between 2004 & 2010. As of October 11th, 2020.
Two women, one house. An intimate story about a Pole and a German placed by war on enemy sides and their parallel lives accidentally brought together. The film reflects on the concepts of invaders, victim, guilt and forgiveness. It confronts different experiences and their paradoxical similarities. It deals with the controversial subject of the post-war accountings. The visual narration is flowing, guided by memories and archives. Traditional documentation confronts experimental use of archival footage in the cinematic impression about displacement.
Wednesday afternoon was deliberately chosen. There were a lot of customers in front of and in the brothers Özcan and Hasan Yildirim’s barbershop on 9 June 2004, when 700 three-inch carpenters’ nails turned into projectiles with a 250 metre range. 22 people were injured. The attack was infamous; the course of the investigations was equally scandalous: the victims were suspected. CCTV material was not analysed and Federal Minister of the Interior Otto Schily decisively ruled out a right wing background. It was only in 2001 that this crime was solved in the course of the revelations concerning the right wing extremist terrorist “National Socialist Underground” group. The trial continues until the present day.
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a professor of literature in Dresden, was Jewish; through the efforts of his wife, he survived the war. From 1933 when Hitler came to power to the war's end, he kept a journal paying attention to the Nazis' use of words. This film takes the end of 1945 as its vantage point, with a narrator looking back as if Klemperer reads from his journal. He examines the use of simple words like "folk," "eternal," and "to live." Interspersed are personal photographs, newsreel footage of Reich leaders and of life in Germany then, and a few other narrative devices. Although he's dispassionate, Klemperer's fear and dread resonate
Inspired by the student revolutions of 1968, two women in Germany and Japan set out to plot world revolution as leaders of the Baader Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army. What were they fighting for and what have we learned?
It was a fateful expedition into the unknown. 50.000 children marched along the banks of the Rhine and the Loire Rivers dressed in rags, dragged themselves barefoot across the snow-covered Alps. They reached the shores of the Mediterranean in a state of exhaustion, and were loaded onto shady ships and ended up as slaves at North African markets. The film snatches the stirring fate of these children from the realm of the forgotten and gives them back their dignity on the pages of history.
This James A. FitzPatrick Traveltalks short visits the West German cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, and Heidelberg. Included are scenes of World War II destruction that lingered at the time.
Documentary about the football ultras subculture in Germany.
June 1941, during World War II. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders the mass abduction of particularly well-bred young children from Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union in order to be educated in German culture, by both state schools and German families…
Counter Shot: Departure of the Filmmakers
Documentary about the bombing of the Plaza de Mayo in June 16 1955 perpetrated by the Argentine navy with the intention of overthrowing Juan Domingo Perón's government and resulting in many civilian casualties.
In 1987 GDR citizen Mario Röllig was arrested in Hungary for attempting to flee the GDR. Nowadays he gives talks about his experiences. This portrait shows just how subjective and riddled with taboos attempts to interpret GDR history can be.
How, in 1945, after the end of World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime, the defeated were atrociously mistreated, especially those ethnic Germans who had lived peacefully for centuries in Germany's neighboring countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. A heartbreaking story of revenge against innocent civilians, the story of acts as cruel as the Nazi occupation during the war years.
This documentary picks up after the horror has ended. Almost 500 teens are in grief as 69 of their friends have fallen. They've been shot dead. How could this island ever become a safe place again? Here, we see how Utøya was first the safest place on Earth to the most terrible and how it was restored and stands as a beacon of hope for the survivors and the Norwegian people.
May 27th, 1971 was a rainy day. In the small town Radevormwald, the world seems to be still in order. But on this day, 46 people die in a train crash, amongst them 41 schoolchildren. Since then, Radevormwald has been connected with one of the worst railway catastrophes of Germany. The touching documentary reconstructs the tragedy and shows how much the event still influences the life in the town until today.
Los ojos de Vera
Volker Koepp documents life in the Dorotheenstadt in Berlin-Mitte, which was called "Feuerland" in the 19th century.
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
Documentary about the German football team at the 1990's World Cup in Italy.
An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.