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Three famous jazz musicians, the German Jochim Kühm, the Moroccan Majid Bekkas, the Spanish Ramon Lopez, realize a long-term dream: One month of free time together in Morocco, time for music, for encounters, for a new CD. They rent a small studio in Rabat and invite guest musicians. They travel to the desert to meet a legendary group of native drummers, to play with them and make recordings. In between excursions into the everyday life of Morocco, computer crashes, and little crises. A film about improvised music and the work on it, a film about encounters of different cultures, a film about understanding and not understanding. Where do you come from, where do you go to?

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NR 2013
Diary of a German Woman

Diary of a German Woman (also known as You are Mine - A German Diary) is the most personal of the Thorndikes’ projects. Based on Annelie’s diary entries, her story was to be the starting point for a kind of all-German ‘Heimatfilm’ that praises the utopian power of the GDR and sharply condemns Federal German wrongs, but finds transcendent beauty on both sides of the wall. Over the course of production, however, the visionary dimension of the project was progressively trimmed down, though it’s still tangible everywhere in the compromised final version. The intensity of its pathos is both oppressive and enchanting; some historical simplifications and ideological twists and bends may be hair-raising, but they still achieve the desired effect.

Diary of a German Woman

8.0 1969
Stau – Jetzt geht’s los

A group of young people in Halle-Neustadt moving aimlessly between the concrete blocks once built as a socialist model housing estate. Familiar certainties dissolved along with the GDR. Even though there were hardly any foreigners in Saxony-Anhalt, a dull aversion to everything that hadn’t been part of daily life until then began to spread. The general dissolution, perceived as a threat, is countered by apparently clear world views. When Thomas Heise won the “Documentary Film Prize 1992” at the Duisburger Filmwoche, the laudation ended with the assumption that the film would probably provoke disagreement. It turned out to be true.

Stau – Jetzt geht’s los

4.4 1992
A Picture of Sarah Schumann

This Harun Farocki film shows the creation of a picture on which the artist worked for nine weeks. Sarah Schumann lives in Berlin and is a pioneer of the feminist scene. 1977 together with several other artists she organized the first large exhibition in which only work by women was shown. Sarah Schumann paints figuratively, that is to say she has developed a technique using layers of collage and painting worked on top of and into one another. Regarding a picture becomes an adventure. (harunfarocki.de)

A Picture of Sarah Schumann

9.0 1978
Osdorfer Born. Werbefilm für die “Hamburger Bautage 1969”

On the occasion of the »Construction Days« in the autumn of 1969, the Hamburg Building Authority commissioned five HFBK film students to film one Hamburg commercial each. Christian Bau opted for a critical portrait of Osdorfer Born, Hamburg's first large-scale, prefabricated housing estate, which had been built from 1967 by Neue Heimat, SAGA and other housing companies on the western edge of the city. The images, shot on 16mm, were accompanied by interview passages and a text taken from SAGA's housing construction program. The client was less than enthusiastic, the film disappeared into a closet for decades and can now be shown for the first time in the cinema.

Osdorfer Born. Werbefilm für die “Hamburger Bautage 1969”

NR 1969
Resistance Fighters – The Global Antibiotics Crisis

The UN General Assembly regards antibiotic-resistance as a "global and most urgent threat". The WHO alarms that we could fall back into a "post-antibiotic age". The film tells us how we got there: It is a story about how negligence, greed, and short-sightedness have rendered the lifesaving effects of antibiotics powerless. It is a science-thriller about disillusioned, fighting doctors, rebellious scientists, patients wrestling with life-threatening diseases and diplomats searching for a global solution. They all are Resistance Fighters.

Resistance Fighters – The Global Antibiotics Crisis

8.0 2019
Thank God I’m in the Film Business!

Eva Ebner is a Berliner who gives the appearance of being rather eccentric. She knows the film business inside out – regardless of whether she’s work- ing behind the camera as an assistant director or in front of it as an actor. Her name is closely associated with a series of now-legendary adaptations of Edgar Wallace’s crime novels which were made in Germany during the 1960s. Upcoming young directors from local film schools have also profited from Ms. Ebner’s unbroken enthusiasm and passion for film. However, this eighty-year-old has a more than broken relationship to the events of her childhood and youth in Gdansk – a time when her life was characterised by an anti-Semitic step-mother and the dangers posed by the Nazi regime. This film portrait does not eschew any of the long dark shadows of that era, nor does it sidestep any friction between portrayer and his subject. (Lothar Lambert)

Thank God I’m in the Film Business!

9.0 2003
First Leipzig Autumn Salon

In 1984, the “First Leipzig Autumn Salon” took place – a risk and a caesura for Dammbeck. Bypassing every state institution, six painters, sculptors and filmmakers organised an art exhibition. It was the first and last of its kind. This recapture of public space through art challenged the government’s monopoly on power and triggered similar activities by other artists in the art centres of the GDR. A brave signal to the SED who saw this exhibition as a “counter-revolutionary development”. After that, there were only two options: regress or leave.

First Leipzig Autumn Salon

NR 2008
A Picture to Remember

An essay-style account of the war from the perspective of three generations of women - those of the director, her mother, and that of her grandmother. Originally from Donetsk - an industrial city in eastern Ukraine - the family was uprooted in 2014 when the Russian war against Ukraine first commenced. By 2022, the same enemy once again began knocking on the door of their new home -which was now in Kyiv- and once again destroyed everything that the family had worked so hard to rebuild. Thrown into the limbo of exile, the director (she is also the narrator of the film) dives into a kaleidoscope of memories and chronicles both her personal and collective familial search for something to hold on to amid these turbulent times.

A Picture to Remember

NR 2023
Gagarin’s Pioneers

"Gagarin’s Pioneers" is a journey of the director in search of his classmates from the 52nd school of the city of Lviv, with whom he studied in Soviet times. These are thirty-three short films about the author's thirty-three classmates. Today, several people still live in Lviv. The rest have gone all over the world. What unites the former pioneers of the Gagarin detachment now? What is the Motherland for them today, to which they swore an oath when they joined the pioneers in the spring of 1973?

Gagarin’s Pioneers

NR 2004
The Hell of Ueckermünde

This report was broadcast on ARD in 1993. In 43 minutes, the development of psychiatry "in the third year after reunification" is shown using two institutions in the new federal states as examples. A touchstone for all of psychiatry and disability care to this day. The film shows a shocking way in which disabled people are treated. The commentary uses the perspective of those affected. 50 years after euthanasia in Germany, this documentary reminds us of this once again.

The Hell of Ueckermünde

NR 1993
Hape Kerkeling – Total Normal

To mark the 60th birthday of the multi-talented comedian, singer and author Hape Kerkeling, the two documentary filmmakers André Schäfer and Eric Friedler have created a quiet, thoughtful and entertaining portrait of this often anarchic humorist. The film tells of his rapid rise as a teenager, his time and the blows of fate during the AIDS epidemic, the controversial forced outing, his confident exit from the show business and his new beginning. The film is a sensitive insight into the family history and a fast-paced journey through the career stages of a formative figure in German TV entertainment.

Hape Kerkeling – Total Normal

8.8 2024
Klassenkampf

In hardly any other country are pupils sorted out as mercilessly as in Germany. The Hauptschule is seen as a reservoir of failures, of those who are stupid, lazy and prone to violence. Nobody goes to secondary school voluntarily. Uli Kick spent a year observing a year 9 class at a Munich secondary modern school during their final year. In his film, only the real experts on secondary modern schools have their say: a teacher who loves her pupils and fights for their presence and attention. And of course the pupils, who have to fight against hopelessness and puberty, but above all against the circumstances they come from. Half of them have only one parent, and many of them speak little or no German at home. Some of them would be completely on their own if it weren't for their teacher and the wonderful janitor who, on the one hand, ensures order via video surveillance and, on the other, takes a greater emotional interest in the pupils' worries than some of their parents.

Klassenkampf

NR 2008
Firestorm

After suffering heavy losses of aircraft during attacks on German factories, Winston Churchill orders cities to be targeted in order to smash German morale and reduce the number of workers available for the Nazi war machine. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians are killed as incendiary bombs turn the center of cities like Hamburg and Dresden into tornados of fire. Sixty years later, a new debate is underway over the reasons for this lethal bombing campaign. Were these relentless aerial attacks on German cities, which killed so many and destroyed so much, a necessary tactic in the war against Hitler? Or was it an act of revenge by the British and Americans? Using rare film footage (much of it in color) and stirring interviews with historians, former bomber pilots and survivors of the destruction, this extraordinary film brings to light the devastating allied air campaign against Nazi Germany.

Firestorm

9.0 2003
The Empty Center

Steyerl’s film traces the impact of an influx of transnational companies on the city dwellers of Berlin in post-reunification Germany. The effect of the changing economy and politics on the city and its inhabitants is echoed through their physical relocation to its outer edges. In 1990, squatters proclaim a socialist republic on the death strip. Eight years later, the new headquarters of Mercedes Benz are built in the same location. The film makes use of slow super-impositions to uncover a journey across changing architectural and cultural boundaries. "The Empty Centre" tries to give a voice and a history to those who continue to be marginalised by the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of the borders which they are trying to cross.

The Empty Center

NR 1998