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The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.

The Rhine is the center of the European soul, the continent's largest and most important river. Over thousands of years, it has formed unique cultural landscapes on its way from the high Alps to the North Sea, in which peoples and nature have shaped each other. On its way from the Gotthard massif to the sea, it connects six countries: Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Germany, France and the Netherlands. For centuries, the Rhine separated the Germans from France, but for almost 70 years it has connected these two countries. But Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy are also within its sphere of influence. Film follows the course of the river exclusively from a bird's eye view and presents a fascinating panorama from the center of Europe that develops its full power on the big screen. From above, our homeland is no longer the same: the glittering floodplains of the Rhine are reminiscent of the Caribbean, the meadows in the alluvial plains look like the Serengeti.

Slovakia lies in the heart of Europe. What natural treasures the small country holds, what spectacular nature and what peculiarities of flora and fauna, it is told in "Wild Slovakia".

Philipp Melanchthon decisively shaped the history of the Reformation in Germany and renewed German education. In the shadow of his fatherly friend Martin Luther, he tirelessly tried to reconcile Reformation and humanism, Protestantism and Catholicism.

This film was made entirely in Ghana and consists of documentary scenes and a fictitious story about a British engineer who wants to import microchips to Africa. But the reaction of the blacks to his plans to build a fully automatic plastic furniture factory surprises him. His faith in technocracy stands opposed to what they know about the environment. When the conflict has reached its climax, a spell is cast upon him... finally, he gives up... but his attitude toward Africa has changed for the better.

A relentless chronicle of the tragedy of the Uighurs, an ethnic minority of some eleven million people who live in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, speak a Turkic language and practice the Muslim religion. The Uighurs suffer brutal cultural and political oppression by Xin Jinping's tyrannical government: torture, disappearances, forced labor, re-education of children and adults, mass sterilizations, extensive surveillance and destruction of historical heritage.

Driven by extensive archive material and interviews with those who know her, this is the astonishing story of how a triple outsider – a woman, a scientist, and an East German – became the de facto leader of the “Free World”, told for the first time for an international audience.

German national election campaign 2002: Henryk Wichmann from the conservative party is fighting a lost battle in the Uckermark.

As common as they are in literature and the movies, in real life there aren't many crooks who will agree to discuss their crimes publicly. In Con Man Confidential, four pathological liars talk candidly about their schemes, their victims and their motivations. It took director Alexander Adolph a couple of years to gain the trust of his subjects and to get unlimited access to their criminal files. Now, Torsten S., Marc Z., Peter G. en Jürgen H. explain how they led double lives for years.

The film follows the life of a large family over three decades and generations. The rising saga of a formerly homeless family survived since the mid-seventies solely thanks to the mother's figure, the strength and bond of this "Mama General". Following her motto, "one for all - all for one," she keeps the family together and tied. And yet, it is no longer like before. One force is noticeably weakening. Mama General is dying...

In the fifties a group of men attempted to ascend the highest peak on earth. In the same year, as the first ascent of Mount Everest succeeded, the German climber Hermann Buhl single-handedly managed to make the first successful ascent of Nanga Parbat. Cameraman Hans Ertl joined the expedition which took place under the toughest conditions and with his camera created a stunning documentary.

As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.

Documentary filmed on a Cadus Search & Rescue Mission in the Mediterranean Sea in the summer 2016.

This documentary chronicles the assassination attempt made on Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944 and the subsequent trial of the conspirators. Film footage is used to lay the foundation for the failed conspiracy that perpetrators hoped would bring an end to the war fueled by Nazi propaganda. Scenes of adoring crowds cheering for Hitler are included to remind the viewer that those who resisted his evil machinations were in only a small minority of military officers among the Nazi faithful.

In Russia’s unwelcoming north, garages stretch out into endlessness. Behind rusty doors everything can be found, except cars. They are the refuge of the Russian man, the vanishing point out of bleak daily life and a signal of hope for big dreams.

Documentary about twin brothers who go back to their childhood home to discover what happened to a Patrick Lurzing, a boy who disappeared who nobody else seems to remember.

Germany's first Open Source movie. A gonzo style documentary.

Deep-sea diver/former propagandist Leni Riefenstahl explores the undersea world of coral reefs in various oceans around the world.

As a Bauhaus photographer, Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) was a pioneer of New Objectivity. Her husband László Moholy-Nagy was appointed to the Bauhaus in 1923. They worked there together and László became famous as the inventor of the photogram, a photo without film. Lucia's contribution to this only became known later. When the Czech-born Jew was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazis seized power, she was unable to take her most important possession, her glass negatives, with her. She struggled to keep her head above water in London and worked for the British secret service on the microfilming of valuable documents. With her vision of microfilm as freely accessible information for all, she is now regarded as a pioneer of the Internet. After the war, Lucia set out in search of her glass negatives.

Life in the GDR was not only documented on behalf of the state, but also by photographic artists and journalists. The documentary goes on a journey through time with some of them and shows little-known aspects of the GDR from its foundation to the fall of the Wall. Photographers in the GDR had a surprising amount of freedom; there was no explicit censorship of images. This allowed them to make visible what the state wanted to hide. This documentary presents two photographers who observed life in the GDR and whose work has been rediscovered in recent years.

An introduction to films by Peter Weiss: "Study II" (1952) "Study IV" (1954)" According to the Law" (1957) "Shaded Faces" (1956 ) "What should we do now? "(1958).

Hans Münch was an infectious disease physician at KZ Auschwitz. His task was to prevent epidemics in the overcrowded camps. When he was forced to actively participate in the mass murder, he began to protest. At the trials in Krakow in 1947 against SS men who committed war crimes, Münch was acquitted. He had refused to participate in the selection, that is, the sorting out of those to be killed and some KZ prisoners testified in his favor. Hans Wilhelm Münch (1911 - 2001) was a German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS physician during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 to 1945 in German occupied Poland.

By accompanying 20 very different individuals in today's Berlin, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and filmmaker Ciro Cappellari sketch a portrait of a modern, stimulating metropolis.

This colour documentary reports about the 5th international peace journey which took place from 30 April to 13 May 1952 and in which 94 drivers from 16 nations took part. Twelve individual stages from Warsaw via Berlin to Prague had to be mastered. The total length was 2135 kilometres, and for the first time the Peace Journey was also held on GDR soil. The individual stages are reported with gripping film shots, short portraits of the cities and regions complete the itinerary. Exciting duels, crashes, winners, but also enthusiastic spectators and cheering workers at the roadsides show the sport from different perspectives. Intermediate cuts and reviews of the expansion and reconstruction of the cities of Warsaw, Berlin and Dresden are also part of this documentary film, as is a critical report on Bloody Sunday in Essen and the police's action against opponents of rearmament in West Germany.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder visited for two weeks the "Theater der Welt" festival in 1981 in Cologne. 30 companies showed in over 100 performances their own visions of a new theater. Framed by Fassbinder's reading of one of the famous essays on theater: Antonin Artaud's "The Theater and its Double". The audience is left to wonder how much of Artaud's radical and beautiful vision is realized in contemporary theater.

For a long time, the village of Urlau at the foot of the Allgäu Alps was only known for its ammunition arsenal. Cäcilia Angerer still remembers the looming catastrophe during World War II. But lately Urlau has been sprucing itself up because a huge resort is about to be built where toxic warfare ammunition was once stored. Christian Skrodzki has been planning a community project to give an old factory building in the village a new purpose. The Wehr family has been preparing their vacation apartment for rent. Things are going well for the region, but suddenly it is proclaimed: "Stay home!"

Three noble single women live between traditional demands and everyday life, between a castle and a prefabricated building, torn apart by their parents' expectations and their own deeply internalised demands. They are outsiders in the microcosm of the German aristocracy. If they want to continue to belong to the aristocracy, they have to marry an aristocratic man or stay single, because within the aristocracy the "male principle" applies.

Vienna, December 2012: A small group of young Afghans and Pakistanis occupy the Votive Church, the largest neo-Gothic church in the country. After accelerated processing, their applications for asylum were turned down, though they had fled extremely dangerous conditions in their home countries, witnessing schools being burned down, beheadings by religious fanatics and murders of their relatives.

Looking for a forgotten city: off the coast of Egypt, just a few metres under the surface, but blanketed by sand and mud, slumbers the ancient port of Heracleion.

The whole world was enthusiastic about Esther, but the Germans were hypnotized. Esther and Abi Ofarim appeared to them not only as representatives of a musical internationalism… but above all as messengers of Israel and a new generation that might find ways of reconciliation.

The multiple, award-winning television author Hubert Seipel, accompanied Vladimir Putin in Russia, over a period of many weeks. He not only conducted several interviews with him, but was also present when Putin shouldered judo opponents, or challenged his bodyguards during a game of ice hockey.

In 1954, a German-Austrian expedition led by Mathias Rebitsch set off for the difficult-to-access Karakoram Mountains, geographically north of the Himalayas. They come across the Hunza, a people who live in the valley of the same name and believe they are descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. The documentary conveys impressions of the poor life of the Hunza people, the harvest, a court hearing, festivals and the children's everyday school life. Finally, the expedition sets off again and sets up its main camp on the moraine ridge of a glacier, where they measure the glacier and the earth's magnetic field. Finally, some men from the research community set off for a sub-peak of Batura.

A great-nephew of Lumumba exposes corruption in the Congo. US drone pilot reveals that innocent people are systematically being killed in attacks. Marc Bauder profiles people who expose widespread injustices—accompanied by Panama Papers authors Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, as well as whistleblower advocate Delphine Halgand-Mishra. S.B.

Kulturfilm about the architecture of the city of Prague.

A documentary about Monika Töpper, a young woman in Gebersdorf, Thuringia, who has cared for her two brothers and elderly father since her mother’s death in 1970. Trained as a porcelain maker instead of the nanny she once dreamed of becoming, she channels her creative spirit into her craft yet yearns for a “big” life beyond her village. Noticing her leadership, the factory’s Party secretary recruits her as an FDJ candidate; she wins a seat on the district Health and Social Welfare Commission. There, Monika champions the needs of a local nursing home, fulfilling one of the great tasks she once only imagined. Torn between duty to her family, her budding political role, and her boyfriend’s ambitions, she realizes that to pursue true fulfillment she must eventually leave Gebersdorf—yet for now remains its devoted daughter.

How should one define the relationship of documentary film to reality? Does it aim at authenticity or is it rather an “exile of reality”, a “foreign homeland of reality”, where the pre-filmic, stripped of its immediacy, comes to its own right in the first place? Where in its mis-en-scène would be the line drawn to a fictional film, if drawing a line would succeed at all? These are the kind of questions this film essay on the history and aesthetics of documentary film deals with in its seven chapters.

The largest pinball event in Europe ever takes place. The largest hall that Gladbeck has to offer is used for this. There are approx. 150 devices in it. The documentary accompanies Gladbeck's Kevin Abramcyk and his friends. For them, the event will make their dream come true. There they run into Ralf Richter - a Ruhrpot icon. It couldn't get any better for the friends. The world's best pinball players fight for the title here.

LITTLE GERMANS combines animation and documentary film to tell the story of children that are born into extreme right-wing families. From a young age on they are trained to hate everything that seems 'foreign'. How does it feel to grow up in a world, where empathy is subsidiary and 'the nation' stands above everything? And who do those 'little Germans' become once they grow up?

Children living with medical conditions spend much of their time navigating a routine of appointments, treatments, and long hospital stays. Phil, Ida, and Emily share this fate. Through drawing, they preserve access to a magical, imaginative world.

Portrait of an actress in constant evolution who, through risk-taking and side steps, has emancipated herself from the overly polished image forged by the Star Wars trilogy to become a talented and committed artist, a recognized ambassador for the feminist cause.

It is the foundation of all life. We live on it and from it: the soil. What does the soil do for us? What do we do with the soil? How is it formed? And why is it in danger? The documentary follows an earthworm through its subterranean life cycle and, from here, keeps returning to researchers whose projects are dedicated to protecting the soil.

Deng Xiaoping's economic and political opening in China. Margaret Thatcher's extreme economic measures in the United Kingdom. Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran. Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The nuclear accident at the Harrisburg power plant and the birth of ecological activism. The year 1979, the beginning of the future.

Documentary about the Belgian surrealist artist who died in 1967.

An exciting story that made history itself. The legendary record label stands for a turbulent success story in East and West that is unparalleled both musically and economically. The record company is home to its own genre, East German rock. City, Puhdys, Karat and Silly became the sound of the GDR, which AMIGA successfully exported to the West even back then. The label probably landed its biggest coup with Karat's "Der Blaue Planet". By 1989, almost 480,000 records had been sold on the other side of the Wall. We were known throughout Germany, sums up the last AMIGA boss, Jörg Stempel, and laid the foundations back then for East German rock to remain so popular today.

A short documentary about Jörg Buttgereit's father.