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Late in the 1980s, two documentary film makers found six German men, all in their 60s and 70s, who had been soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and they still had their film. "Mein Kreig" alternates between interviews with these older men, now apologetic, philosophical, or defiant about their participation, and the footage they shot. It's chronological: basic training, the train trip East, roof-top vistas of war-torn Warsaw, peasants in Belarus, the downing with carbine volleys of a Russian plane, winter, a holiday at the Black Sea, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one says.

Documentary on the Nanjing Massacre.

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.

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.

A glittery nightclub in 1920s Berlin becomes a haven for the queer community in this documentary exploring the freedoms lost amid Hitler’s rise to power.

Klaus is one of the numerous drug addicts in Austria. His story (parents are separated and he is isolated) is made more realistic with interviews. Not only do the therapists of the drug units at Mödling and Enns, the physicians and politicians who are confronted with these social problems have their say, but also the man on the street who expresses the "voice of the people" - and many other drug addicts.

What story is hidden in the stranded suitcase full of pictures, sounds and letters whose origins we do not know? The film is an homage to cinema, a film poem made up of images between dream and reality; a network of sounds, text fragments and voices that leads far out into the world and at the same time close to us. Aren’t we all floating islands?

Portrait of Georg Glaser, who is a writer in the mornings and a blacksmith in the afternoons.

This documentary focuses on the lives of doctors and nurses working in an intensive care unit. Their daily work, which is marked by emotional challenges and ethical questions, demands strength and courage from the doctors, who sometimes have to make life-and-death decisions for their patients.

"Love Scam - Die Geschichte eines unglaublichen Betrugs" is a true crime series on sky.

In Afghanistan Amena Karimyan founded the astronomical group Kayhana – which is Persian for “little universe.” Using a self-built model of the planets, she encourages young girls to reach for the stars. After the radical Islamic Taliban seized power, she was forced to flee the country and is now struggling to build a new life in Germany. Since girlhood, this young Afghan has dreamt of flying to the moon – a dream that suddenly seems within her grasp yet remains impossible to achieve. Stuck between the burden of her past, German bureaucracy and her own ambitions, Amena embarks upon a mission to find her place on earth. In atmospheric images of this and other worlds, Little Universe portrays an ambitious Afghan woman who questions our perceptions of refugee women.

Wilhelm II. arrives in Haifa, Israel.

A portrait of the young generation in Germany during the 1990s, denying a stereotyping from the outside.

The real story of Monika Ertl, the woman who avengeded Che Guevara.

The beginnings, development and decline of so-called spaghetti-western genre; with clips, interviews and opinions of producers, actors and directors. A nostalgic look at those movies that are still in the taste of many.

At the age of 97 Riefenstahl returns to Sudan for one final farewell to the Nuba that she lived with for 8 months and photographed and filmed extensively. Müller documents her return after 23 years away and her reaction to the collapsing culture that she once celebrated so avidly in her photographs.

Second bandoneon film by Klaus Wildenhahn.

A documentary about how the Salzburger Festspiele came to be and evolved almost 100 years ago.

The ultimate icons of the polar wilderness able to withstand the harshest environments and remain a top predator; the lives of polar bears are nothing short of remarkable!

19 months after the fall of the dictator Somoza, the Austrian film team travels across Nicaragua for seven weeks (from August 4th to September 20th, 1980) and gathers information, mostly from farmers, workers, market women and soldiers. We are shown life in the Fincas, the agricultural co-operatives, in a banana plantation of Standard Fruit, a private corporation, in the "Carlos Roberto Huembes Hospital" in La Esperanza which is run by Austrians. A report on Nicaragua of 1980 which discusses the dream of the murdered freedom fighter of Nicaragua, General C.A. Sandino and whether it has been realized and answers this question affirmativeley. In spite of the present and threatening difficulties, the film is optimistic.

The film outlines the life of this revolutionary leader of the German and international working-class movement.

Mondo-style shockumentary about various aspects of the occult and paranormal. An investigation into the fringes of psychic spirituality with so-called experts, it includes demonic possession, exorcism, seances, Voodoo ceremonies, hypnotism, ESP, psychic surgery, and more. A warning bell alerts squeamish viewers to avert their eyes from the more graphic scenes.

A documentary about Swiss mountain folk.

With his wild hair, Jean Rondeau is a rock star of the harpsichord. Profile of the young French harpsichord player who is breathing new life into an instrument that is too often ignored.

Today, the only inhabitants of this environmentally inhospitable Pacific island are birds and crabs. Yet over 80 years ago, Clipperton hosted other visitors: a demented rapist and a terrified group of women and children. Cousteau returns to the island to recreate the deadly series of events - from the death of the brave French captain to the courage of the widow who killed her torturer - through the eyes of one of the survivors, then a child.

Born in 1941, Eric Burdon was – along with his band The Animals – one of the most important standard-bearers of the British Invasion of America, right after The Beatles and ahead of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks. Their 1964 interpretation of House of the Rising Sun was a global hit and inspired Bob Dylan (who recorded an acoustic version on his first album) to go electric and hit the stage from then on backed by a rock band.

Music as a counter-project to a bourgeois existence: Musicians, club and label operators, record store owners and other music lovers talk about how, despite social and economic constraints, they realize their very different, bohemian and sometimes precarious life projects on the sidelines - and always go on. Detailed essays, experience reports, portraits and interviews are dedicated to the alternative music and club scene in Berlin and Hamburg.

Tomi Ungerer moves with his wife Yvonne from New York to Nova Scotia, to a small peninsula with a wooden fisherman's house and a few stables. This first of four documentaries that Adlon makes about the French artist and writer is a breakthrough - both for Ungerer, who becomes better known in Germany as a result, and for the filmmaker himself, who signs his first major work with it.

Two newspaper reports from the same day mark the beginning of the story: a sparrow is shot dead in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, while a German soldier is killed in an attack in Afghanistan. Scheffner sets out on a journey into a deceptive peace.

After suffering a stroke during a performance, cabaret artist Rainald Grebe faces up to his illness. A touching documentary about his return to the stage.

In recent years, the number of diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has skyrocketed. What are the reasons? Does a society geared towards efficiency use the label ADHS to weed out anyone who does not fit its frames? What are the consequences of the fact that medication treatment has become almost ubiquitous? Could Ritalin and the like have become the doping of the performance society?

Documentary about the murder of three Kurdish women activists in Paris in 2013 and the investigations against an agent of the Turkish intelligence service MIT.

The film tells the story of the fight for a national soccer team in West Germany and East Germany. It tells of the forgotten lifetime achievements of the German female soccer pioneers and the fight for their place "on the pitch". A fight full of unbelievable, almost absurd twists and turns and stories that reveal a great deal about male heroic images and clichéd images of women in East and West.

Noga is a high school teenager who is eager to be accepted into the best unit of the Israeli army. Moran is a religious social worker who has chosen as a home town Sderot, which is under the threat of rockets. In this Israeli-Jewish town also lives Hanadi, a young Arab woman from the northern part of the country, fighting for her identity. Through an attempt to understand the choices of these women, the personal story of the filmmaker is revealed. From north to south, from past to present, the quest for answers creates an intimate portrait of women in a country at war.

Eric Friedler, multiple winner of the Grimme and German Television Awards, accompanies the actors from back then on a journey into their past. In intense encounters and interviews, he unearths painful confessions and suppressed feelings of guilt and shows how close fame and misery, rise and fall lie to one another.

Tabu, a mythical tale shot in Tahiti, is yet another key to Ottinger’s cinema. Aloha is a dedication to Murnau, as well as Gauguin, Matisse and her other predecessors whose hearts and eyes had been enchanted by foreign cultures. By juxtaposing footage and outtakes from Tabu with scenes from her own films, the director creates a dialogue between fictional universes separated by time and space. A fish is caught by islanders in 1931 and eaten by pirates in Madame X forty years later. What is this film if not an ironic commentary on artistic legacy and succession?

In the west of Ukraine, not far from the border to Romania, there is a faraway European city: Chernivtsi. It was once the centre of Jewish culture in the Bukowina, a border area characterized over centuries by a multi-cultural mixture of peoples. Here, Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Germans and Jews lived side by side. Volker Koepp’s film focuses on Mr. Zwilling and Mrs. Zuckermann, two of the last few Jews born in the old Chernivtsi/Czernowitz. They share a friendship but also their love for the German language. Mr. Zwilling visits 90-year-old Mrs. Zuckermann daily in the early hours of the evening. They talk about old times, about shared events, about politics and literature and the worries of everyday life.

For his supporters he is a “figure of light”; for his enemies he is an “agitator” and “Islam hater”. Opinions differ about Ahmad Mansour. Born in Israel to a Palestinian family, the nationally known psychologist Mansour fights against anti-Semitism and extremism in Germany. The devout Muslim warns against political Islam, does preventive work and at the same time criticizes Germany's migration policy. He seeks dialogue and yet, as a highly vulnerable person, he can no longer take a step in public without massive police protection. Journalists from "report München" were able to exclusively accompany Ahmad Mansour for months and in the documentary they show how he continues despite the constant pressure and death threats against himself and his family. Will he be able to talk to his harshest critics or will he, like so many others, give up in frustration?

„Heimspiel“ tells the story about the game an energy company in Germany is playing with three villages. For lignite mining, villages are getting demolished, replacement villages are built from the scratch and the villagers are getting resettled. For some the demolition of their homes means great pain. Others, however, are happy about the generous financial compensation. But all of a sudden one of the villages will be preserved. Everyone in the village becomes an ally or an enemy. It‘s a film about the „home sweet home“, neighbourhoods and about the power of money.

They’re small, clever, and incredibly strong-willed: dachshunds. Their soulful gaze wins hearts and fuels their lasting popularity. Once royal hunting dogs, they now take on unusual jobs—like Strolchi, a miniature dachshund who sniffs out woodworm in historic buildings. The bond between humans and dachshunds goes back to Celtic times. Archaeologists have even found joint burials of people and dachshund-like dogs. Versatile and charming, they thrive as city pets, hunting companions, and even racers—like those at the annual Wiener Race in Kirchheimbolanden. Beloved far beyond Germany, dachshunds have fans in France too, with events like Paris’s “Sausage Walk.”

Pop star Peggy March visits the cosmopolitan city within its western districts and talks about her life in the USA and Germany in equal measure, while the greatest hits of her career come to life within the city!

The film tells the stories of five people with special abilities who treat and heal their patients in an unconventional way. These charismatic healers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland are the subjects of this documentary which sets out to show how their old-school, arcane methods can serve as an addition to conventional, academic medicine.

The two friends have traveled the world for many mountainous adventures, but while skiing in distant locations this idea grew in their minds: a ski expedition that starts right on their own doorsteps. Six weeks, 1.800 km, 35.000 vertical meters and a dream come true. After pedaling and skiing through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France, they reached the beach in Nice in early June 2018. The movie premiered at St. Anton Filmfest in August 2018.

When the snow melts and the hills of Appenzell are dotted with green and white, buckets of water slowly make their way up and down the slope. After a time, the gentle movement turns into violent swaying. Shots ring through the air, the buckets are punctured. Slowly the water begins to flow. This is the high point of a ritual that begins deep within the bowels of the mountain. Then trails of water spurt through the air to the thawing slopes and the water begins to gush, nearly causing the well in the valley to overflow.

A married couple looks for answers to their sexual problems. Leading GDR sexologist Dr. Siegfried Schnabl gives advice.