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Drinking Battle

A vivid document of the hard-drinking West Berlin scene of the late eighties, and at the same time one of the last important events before the fall of the Wall. “On the afternoon of 25.06.89, my good friend Wolfgang came to me and told me about a tequila fight drink that Andi wanted to organize with friends in a tin store in Mittenwalderstraße in Kreuzberg. We grabbed the VHS camera and went along. 13 hard-drinking participants, including two New Zealanders, took part. The rules were simple: "One tequila every five minutes! If you don't drink, you're out!" Our plan: Wolfgang was to drink along first and then take over the camera later to film "insight", so to speak. I was supposed to film the beginning and then, as a non-alcoholic drinker, support him. After a short time, however, Wolfgang got so carried away that everything turned out quite differently...“

Drinking Battle

NR 1989
Eine verfahrene Kiste

A lost box is a strange one that nobody knows. It appears in the middle of an apartment exchange involving the Ilse and Rudi Karschek family and another couple. Since no one can be assigned to this box, it is opened; the contents: the portrait of an attractive girl who dedicated it to "her" Rudi. Rudi, however, is quite sure that this must be a misunderstanding. But then his wife Ilse receives a phone call in their new apartment that is not at all misleading, which brings the situation in the Karschek family to a head. In this respect, the whole affair becomes a total "mess".

Eine verfahrene Kiste

NR 1988
Portrait of Heiner Müller for his 60th Birthday

This portrait of Heiner Müller on the occasion of his 60th birthday is devoted for the most part to having Müller recount events and memories from the first quarter of his life, starting with his birth on January 9, 1929 and closing with his immediate postwar experiences in the mid-1940's. This part memoire, part biographical sketch of his early life includes descriptions of his parents’ background and employment activities, the arrest and incarceration of his father in a concentration camp in 1933, Müller’s recollections of school life in Nazi Germany, Müller’s brief detention in an American POW camp at the end of the war and, upon release, his adventurous return to his home in the Soviet Zone in eastern Germany. These snapshots of his first 16 years also include anecdotes about Peter the Great and Andrei Platonov’s “Sluices of Epiphany” as well a meditation on a scene from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Portrait of Heiner Müller for his 60th Birthday

NR 1989
Wir sind Sintikinder und keine Zigeuner

The nine-year-old Sinti girl Brigitta shows us her world. She lives with her family in a caravan site on the outskirts of a small Bavarian town. Everybody still speaks Romani and continues to live by the customs handed down. That means that the children take part in adult life and that the very highly respected parents describe how it used to be. In this community, all age groups live together naturally. For these Sinti, `gypsy' is an insult. At school they are taught there are two cultures, two languages and two realities: that of the Sinti and that of the Germans. While German is spoken at school, the only pupils are Sinti children. Brigitta animatedly describes the material deprivations, which are mollified by the life as `one big family'. Brigitta knows all too well where she belongs.

Wir sind Sintikinder und keine Zigeuner

NR 1981
September September

"[This film] embodies (...) one of his [Hahnemann's] most mature films. Rainy rides along Schönhauser Allee, which seems to be depopulated. Past the 'Viennese Café', the meeting place par excellence. From a moving train the view of idyllic landscapes, on the horizon a castle. The camera tilts, turns, until the world is upside down. Scenes of an action with the artist friend Heike Stephan: in the sanctuary Hahnemann, black painted with a white turban, and Stephan, stack cages with rabbits on top of each other. Then TV recordings of a discussion forum with Jean-Luc Godard and Rosa von Praunheim - scenes as from another planet. From the off again and again a poem Hahnemann, recited by Peter Mario Graus. The diction is initially calm, almost factual, increases, eventually overturns, but then falls back, resigned. " (Claus Löser in "Gegenbilder")

September September

NR 1986
Special Police Assignment

A film about soccer without a ball and without players ... The film gives a description of the preventive measures taken by the police to cope with a huge crowd attending a popular spectacle. It deliberately and almost completely dispenses with verbal statements, allowing atmosphere and original sound to speak for themselves. The clip-clop of (police) horses' hooves, the sound of the engines of police vehicles, of helicopters and water cannons, of walkie-talkies as well as video camera surveillance and the distribution of truncheons on the one hand, and the heaving crowd of fans, their pleasure, their disappointment, their shouts of support. The chronological record of a - peaceful - day of soccer does not apportion blame, without comment and stimulates discussion weather the "special police assignment" is really necessary. —JK

Special Police Assignment

NR 1987
Ein Leben

Using photos and letters that the director found in a landfill, she reconstructs in her documentary film the life of Maria Bartel, a Berlin baker born in 1902 who, as the director comments in voice-over, "was in the prime of her life during fascism." In 1920, she moved from the East Prussian province to Berlin with her first husband. After his suicide, she opened a bakery, which she ran until the end of the war in 1945, raised her son, and now has various relationships and love affairs.

Ein Leben

NR 1980