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More than half of the world’s preventable blindness is caused by cataract disease, a clouding of the clear lens of the eye. In developing countries like Nepal, it is not only a personal tragedy, but can devastate the economy of entire communities. Fortunately, it is also easy to cure. Cataract surgery is one of the most effective medical interventions on earth, but until recently was considered too expensive to provide to the rural poor. Most of the world’s blind people live in remote, impoverished areas. The majority of doctors able to cure them work in cities. Dr. Sanduk Ruit from Nepal, and his American partner, Dr. Geoff Tabin, have made perfecting a portable low cost surgical procedure to restore sight their life‘s work. They trek to Nepal’s remote Northeast, carrying an entire hospital on porters‘ backs. Their mission is to bring the needlessly blind out of the darkness.

My hometown, Beirut, is torn apart by a corrupt political elite, anti-government protests, and one of the biggest explosions of the 21st century. But above the roofs of the city, I discovered an unexpected bearer of hope: the pigeon game of chance "Kash Hamam". Every evening, the sky populates, and all over the city swarms fly out of their cages. Their flight follows the choreography of an ancient tradition. Each player holds their own flock and lets it circle over his house, with the chance to lure the pigeons of the neighbors onto his roof to expand his flock. During the recent political collapse of Lebanon, we embark on a journey from roof to roof. When it all perishes, why do we hold on to flying? The film observes a city in turmoil from the perspective of three pigeon players and a young girl fighting to release her own birds.

Between 1927 and 1929 race car driver Clärenore Stinnes and cameraman Carl-Axel Söderström travel around the world in a car and shoot a documentary about it...

Three young Roma women use their super power to take a stand against everyday racism.

Dentist Jantzen went bankrupt. The few selected objects in his apartment are charged with cryptic meaning. The protagonist leads through his apartment, a self-staging in the ritual of loneliness.

Only in exile can Uyghurs from the Chinese province of Xingjang still live out their culture. A struggle against oblivion and loss of identity.

Minimal stories in a Belarusian village apparently indifferent to the popular uprisings in Minsk. The young director, who has left the country, defines them as 'choreographies of everyday life' in a film about 'rules that limit personal freedoms and at the same time ensure that the social organism works...'

The film tells the story of the rise and fall of Julian Assange. Once a celebrated publicist and over the years decried as an eccentric, spy and rapist. The documentary shows a differentiated picture of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. For the first time in German television Assange’s fiancée gives an interview. Further interviews, amongst others, with former CIA-director Leon Panetta, Edward Snowden and John Shipton.

Documenting the performance journey of the artists Susie Wimmer, Andreas Schock and Moni Single from "Clowns Without Borders" to Iranian aid institutions - homes for orphans and street children, hospitals, psychiatric clinics and refugee camps.

Paradox presents "Fuck the System", the second movie from the legendary daredevil Berlin Parkour crew "Berlin Kidz", released as a limited collector DVD edition in December 2017, sold out in a month, and now available as an exclusive on demand video. 4 years after the first DVD, "Fuck the System" is an adrenaline-fuelled 70' action documentary filmed by the Berlin crew with drones and go-pro cameras to closely capture the essence of parkour, train surfing, urban climbing & risk-taking graffiti in a gripping cat-and-mouse chase in the heart of the german metropolis. With "Fuck the System", we follow the Berlin Kidz from the very inside in their unrelenting quest for freedom.

This is about sex. About sex in Germany and who, on which side of the Iron Curtain, was better at it. At the end of the Second World War, Germans shared the same culture, lifestyle, morals. But four decades later, everything had changed. Forty years of division left their mark in many places—including the beds of the German people.

In the Anthropocene, Homo sapiens has become Homo mobilis: highways, railways, air and sea connections. But wild animals also want to be mobile. They always have been, even though neither road maps nor navigation systems show us their migration routes on land, water, and in the air. Their migrations safeguard Europe's biodiversity.

What happened in 1953 in Stalin’s secret dacha in Kuntsevo? The last five days of the dictator. The film presents narratives about the life and death of the scrupulous power seeker Stalin. A life full of cruelties and red glamour which ended 70 years ago in his secret dacha in Kuntsevo. The almighty suddenly powerless.

World history meets local history on the street corner of Sperlingsberg in Oberdorla, Thuringia. In 1945, an American soldier was shot here. A photo of him became famous and, decades later, is circulating on the internet. Director Christa Pfafferott places this picture at the beginning of her research.

The queer community has long since established itself in large cities, but in rural areas, queer people live less publicly. And when they do, worlds often collide. The documentary shares silent struggles, but also moments of solidarity. The film takes an in-depth look at the challenges, but also the hopes and successes of queer people in rural areas. It shows how social change and greater acceptance can develop in smaller towns. The province is more than just the antithesis of the big city - it can be a place of change in which queer people find their own ways to assert their place.

Thomas Schütte's work is always about people. His works have gravity and lightness, but they also show damage, power relations, fears, dependencies, evil, weird and beautiful figures. Schütte studied from 1973 to 1981 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter. Today, he is one of the most important contemporary artists and is represented in all major museums and collections worldwide.

Alexandra Leykauf tries to remove the objects from their museum temporality. She shows them as they were floating in the air, wedged between the transparent slats of highly reflective display cases that function as masks as much as display units.

The first engagement at the small theater in the Mecklenburg province presents Gesa and Arikia with challenges. Schumann accompanies the young women during their first two years, telling of their hopes and doubts, of internal and external resistance.

In the midst of the transition towards reunification and a market economy, two teams meet for the last time in the final of the FDGB Cup shortly after the 1990 Volkskammer elections: favorites Dynamo Dresden and Polizeisportverein Schwerin. Matthias Hufmann and Benjamin Unger take a look back 30 years later.

Marco Wilms and Issar, the Indian tailor, met in Thailand, where Wilms applied for a job.

What are the wild waves saying ? Following up on Saturn and beyond (Georges de Beauregard International Award, FID 2021), Declan Clarke listens in again. The waves here, are those that, through the figure of the writer Francis Stuart, connected the Irish nationalist movement to Nazi Germany : anti-English broadcasts for German radio from 1940 to 1944, pirate radio transmitter sent from Germany to Ireland, infiltration of German agents helped by the author’s wife who stayed in Ireland… The director plays the writer’s role but we never hear his voice, as if to offset the power of radio as a means of propagating a discourse. Both rigorous and playful, vivid and melancholic, this film is a meditation on political compromission and the mass media that serve as their tools.(Nathan Letoré)

Documentary film in competition at the 1st Berlin Film Festival

The Obersalzberg retreat was the summer residence and retreat of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and his closest confidants in the Nazi regime. The public are mainly familiar with fi lm footage and photographs from the alleged Nazi idyll. For the first time, eye witnesses are willing to talk about their experiences in Obersalzberg.

MYRIAD is a poetic experience along the global paths of animal migration.

A film-experiment in six hundred takes, three seconds each, of a European's private images in Africa and of an African's images in Europe. A mutual perception of the one's and the other's native place.

Mongolia is one of the ten most resource-rich countries in the world. Unbelievable riches are stored in the ground: coal, copper, zinc, rare earths and also gold. A lot of gold! The largest deposit in Mongolia was once explored by GDR geologists – and discovered a deposit of more than 40 tons of gold. But not a single gram of it has ever arrived in Germany. The film accompanies the geologist Frieder Hacker from Freiberg and his Mongolian wife Solongo. On the trail of this secret expedition, the two travel to Mongolia once again.

Hackers are attacking city administrations and hospitals, paralyzing companies and blocking access to critical infrastructure. Cyber attacks are unleashing their destruction with full force. Renowned experts are already talking about a cyber war. In the middle of Germany. The often poorly protected computer systems in Germany are an easy target for hackers. The two authors of "Report München", Benedikt Nabben and Sabina Wolf, spent a year tracking down the hackers. They met secret service agents, horrified victims and made contact with the perpetrators. In early 2023, hackers attack a small German town, steal huge amounts of data and encrypt the city administration's IT systems. It is completely unclear why the town was attacked. But the perpetrators' trail leads to Russia.

Discover Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, conducted by Christian Thielemann and directed by Jan Philipp Gloger at the 2013 Bayreuth Festival.

Documentary film about the racing cyclist Albert Richter, who was murdered by the Gestapo in Lörrach during the Third Reich. In addition to depicting the unique cycling career of German champion and world champion Albert Richter, the film reconstructs the background to his murder by the Nazis in January 1940. Almost imperceptibly, the viewer is drawn into an exciting political criminal case and its investigation on camera.

Rosa von Praunheim has made 150 films and repeatedly provoked the middle-class to homophobic majority society. But he doesn't spare his own community either by accusing many gays of being conformist soft-spoken people; and by outing some prominent homosexuals against their will, he has made many enemies. For the younger generation of LGBTIQ activists, Rosa von Praunheim is still known as a figure from the early phase of the queer movement, but as a white cis man he hardly gets a hearing there. However, Rosa does not want to argue and theorize, but above all to live out his creativity. Sometimes narcissistic, sometimes angry and combative, sometimes anxious - and always with his own style. Companions such as the comic book creator Ralf König, the producer Regina Ziegler and the New York publicist Brandon Judell pay tribute to the artist and activist Rosa von Praunheim, who calls himself a “lucky child” because he was mostly able to do what he felt like doing.

A television documentary directed by Marcel Ophüls examining the Munich Conference of September 28, 1938, when European leaders met to avert the outbreak of war. Through archival documents and interviews, the film reconstructs the political atmosphere surrounding negotiations between Britain and France on one side and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on the other, situating the agreement within the broader context of European appeasement in the face of fascism.

A gripping report shot at the Brandenburg steel and rolling mill from a visiting Austrian director's point of view. Void of any propagandistic interpretation, the film captures both the dynamic forces and the hazards involved in this work.

“Stayer” bicycle races were big events up to the 1980s. The cyclists and their pacesetters on heavy motorcycles were popular stars. Today only half a dozen teams remain. They regularly compete on the banked curves of the century-old racetrack in Zurich-Oerlikon. They are perhaps the last of their kind.

Documentary film.

Documentary about three Berlin cleaning ladies, their lives and their shattered dreams. The directors succeed in gaining deep insights into German reality, which the three women candidly reveal. Bourgeoisie, orderliness and an addiction to harmony come to the fore as well as a touching kindness and everyday wisdom.

Documentary about stuntman Rémy Julienne.

The German director Percy Adlon talks about his career.

How does art come about, and how do we perceive of it? This film takes us to studios, galleries and bars. An amusing study on art - and how one lives with it.

In the new South Africa, everyone is equal: blacks, whites, Indians, and coloreds. On a train journey from Cape Town to Johannesburg, they encounter the fractures of their past: 25 years after apartheid, nothing is as it was, but nothing is as it should be either. The film tells of inner boundaries, unresolved prejudices, unfulfilled hopes, and smoldering conflicts. Everyone is sitting on the same train, but not in the same compartment.

The highest peak in the Thuringian Forest, the Inselsberg, is surrounded by peaceful health resorts and industrious rural towns: Friedrichsroda, Tabarz, Schmalkalden, Bad Liebenstein, Bad Salzungen, Ruhla, and Eisenach, the town of Wartburg Castle. We observe knife and scissors smiths and other craftsmen at work in their workshops. Tabarz: Health resorts and industrious rural towns.

Andrei Proskuryakov's documentary delves into a profound examination and contemplation of the events that transpired on January 31, 1945. On that day, the Nazis perpetrated a large-scale execution of approximately 3,000 prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp on the shores of the Baltic Sea, near the village of Palmnicken in East Prussia. The film is meticulously structured around three pivotal individuals: Martin Bergau, a former Hitler Youth member who was connected to the tragedy; Gunther Nitsch, a German-American writer whose grandfather was involved in exhuming the victims» bodies; and Simcha Koplowicz, the son of Sheva Koplowicz, a survivor of the massacre. Through these characters, the documentary meticulously examines the historical silence that surrounded this tragedy and endeavors to reveal the unvarnished truth surrounding the event.