pogendroblem präsentiert: Auf der Suche nach der Utopie

A stroll through East Berlin in 1977 - unique original recordings of the GDR capital by day and night, summer and winter, accompanied by music, offer a comprehensive insight into the diversity of urban life at that time. Numerous sights, famous buildings and squares, such as the television tower, the Red City Hall, the Palace of the Republic, Alexanderplatz and Unter den Linden, are shown. Popular places for leisure and recreation are also filmed, including the zoo, Volkspark Friedrichshain, the Christmas market on Alex and the Pankow outdoor pool. The film team also interviews a wide variety of Berliners, giving an impression of the lifestyle and everyday life of the capital's inhabitants at the time. The cityscape is rounded off with insights into new housing developments, renovated streets, businesses, restaurants and stores as well as official political events, military parades and memorial ceremonies.

A focus on the inner workings of a political party making headlines at district, state and national level as an “alternative for Germany”. Thanks to the film’s striking objectivity, it becomes clear where argument ends and contradictions begin.

An audiovisual experiment that shows how oil is refined into gasoline and ultimately powers cars and other vehicles, accompanied by classical music and experimental synthesizer sounds. Filmed in the Libyan desert, the film traces the path and development of the gasoline, from the extraction of oil as it is drilled in the Libyan desert to the pump at the gas station, making road construction machines dance and convertibles roar through the Spessart forests. This film also drew Herbert von Karajan and Leo Kirch's attention to Hugo Niebeling, in which the director has road bulldozers "dance" to the music of Vivaldi.

Planet der Spatzen

Was wurde aus der Stasi?

These days it seems that nothing is as polarizing and controversial as religious belief. Everywhere one goes it seems that people are asking the question: Do we even need religion? Is it limiting our understanding? What kind of world is being produced by these faith systems? Regardless of your answers to these questions, it is hard to deny that worship still plays an important role in many people's lives and many people simply do not understand where others are coming from. Believers is a unique exploration of those questions related to faith by focusing the lens on five of the world's belief systems, Agnosticism, and the new Atheism. The film follows Sacha Sewhdat's personal journey towards understanding as he searches for the value of religion in modern society. With honesty and objectivity Sacha explores what it means to believe in a higher power or what it would mean to let those beliefs go. It will both inform and challenge what you know about religion in the 21st Century.

Four years after Pour la suite du monde (1963), director Pierre Perrault asks Alexis Tremblay if he'll agree to travel with his wife Marie to the country of their ancestors, France. In a montage parallel, we follow them in France and listen to them talking to their friends about it.

The "stone in the mouth" is the scar that the mafia makes on betrayal's corpse. The modern mafia has the historical and sociological roots into the birth of the american capitalism at the time of Roosevelt. The American "Cosa Nostra" applies the similar methods as the sicilian mafia: same apparatus, same "omertà", same power and same terror. Giuseppe Ferrara, journalist and writer, uses fragments footage, film clips, and current news to make this film.

Documentary that explores the life and career of leading man Cary Grant through film clips and interviews. Produced as S18E03 of the long running series American Masters.

Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.

Africa Trek

An ascetic walks through the narrow streets of a village every morning while his family is still asleep. In his semi-somnolent state he dreams about the history of the village mixing up myths, folklore and facts.

Amit Dutta recorded several conversations with Prof. B.N. Goswamy, an important art historian of India, covering his entire body of work. Interspersed with his talks were also some silences. This film draws upon some of those moments of silence and weaves them into a web of ideas and images that fill the art-historian’s mindscape.

A look at the varied new ways Americans are choosing to both find meaning and celebrate life as it comes to an end.

A forensic archaeologist unearths new clues to Hitler's secret extermination camp in Poland, where up to 900,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.

A look at the rise and fall of Adam Ant. From his early 80's success, to his struggle with depression.

When Women Kill is a poignant documentary exploring the shocking violence that seven women fell victim to at the hands of men. The program profiles the battered women who speak frankly about the cruel abuse, threats, and fears, and the overassertive men who led them down a one-way path to death and destruction. The film features in-prison footage, including a segment depicting a confession by a follower of the notorious Charles Manson, Leslie Van Houten, who was convicted of two killing sprees and committed to life in prison.

"What Sex Am I?" follows a group of Transgender individuals struggling to make their way in every strata of 1980s America. From finding employment to finding acceptance, the first question the world forces them to ask is always, "What Sex Am I?"

Documentary about Japanese musician Keiji Haino. Includes clips of live performances and extracts from dozens of hours of interviews with Haino and members of Fushitsusha.

This short film serves as a cautionary tale to farmers who recklessly cut down trees on their land. When prairie farmers engaged in this practice to facilitate plowing, they discovered that the trees had served as windbreaks protecting top soil from erosion. The Dominion Department of Agriculture's experimental station at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, cultivated acres of young trees for distribution to farmers.