
Europa Passage
2022 | 89 min | Documentary
A movie about people who have no chance but still try to make the best of it. And about the price they have to pay for it.


2022 | 89 min | Documentary
A movie about people who have no chance but still try to make the best of it. And about the price they have to pay for it.

2024 | 75 min | Documentary
Torn between two worlds: Maria regularly leaves her home in Romania to work as a 24-hour caregiver in Austria. Her sons grow up in Ibănești while she cares for a woman in need of nursing care in Vienna. Every goodbye is difficult, every return is marked by joy, but also by the certainty that she will soon have to leave again. MÂINE MĂ DUC – TOMORROW I LEAVE by Lukas Schöffel and Maria Lisa Pichler is an intimate documentary about the reality of life for many Eastern European caregivers who balance ...

2017 | 82 min | Documentary
In Russia they were "the fascists", in Germany they are "the Russians". In 2001, the filmmaker's family emigrated from Omsk, Siberia to Germany. In this film she portrays her family, who are colloquially referred to as "Russian Germans" and in official parlance as "ethnic German repatriates". Heckmann expresses a feeling of foreignness in long shots that show the feeling of loss and embitterment from people who are at home neither here nor there. "It's an uneasiness that makes FAMILY LIFE a winning ...

2023 | 18 min | Shorts
Set in the deserted off-season on the Italian coast, caregivers Anca and Zoya meet at a bus stop shortly before returning home and decide to visit a client's abandoned beach house. A brief vacation turns into a moment of solidarity and tenderness that challenges the structural norms that govern their daily lives. “The discourse on the inner-European class question has never been more present and at the same time more repressed. As a German-Romanian, I encounter these socio-economic conditions every ...

2014 | 15 min | Shorts
Ella is a Polish migrant worker who works in Germany to finance her daughter's studies in Poland. Due to illness, her job seems to be in jeopardy. When her daughter decides to come to Germany and faces the same fate as Ella, the mother decides to blackmail her boss for severance pay. The film ELLA deals with social tensions and dependencies that recur in many European migration biographies. The short film focuses on family responsibility, structural exploitation, and the tension between origin and ...

2021 | 28 min | Drama
A young Romanian woman visits her uncle, who emigrated to the United States many years ago to build a new life as a baker. What begins as a happy reunion soon turns into a trial of strength, when a broken tooth that the uncle refuses to have treated raises questions about identity, origins and life choices. Editor Note Anna-Lena Engelhardt: THE SMOOTHNESS OF OUR TEETH is my Master of Arts graduation film at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. Poetry, subtlety and a kind of softness mixed ...

2008 | 84 min | Documentary
Citygoers are familiar with the sight of (presumably) Eastern European panhandlers working the streets. But who are they? Filmmaker Ulli Gladik finds out. Natasha was begging in Graz when Gladik met her. Many long conversations later, he accompanied her to her hometown in a former industrial site near Sofia. Clichés about beggars from the former Eastern Bloc dissolve image by image. Natasha is sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes in love or depressed - just as any we all are from time to time. "The ...

2015 | 82 min | Documentary
In Margina, Ljupcho Temelkovski accompanies a Roma family in Macedonia. The film observes the laborious everyday life of the characters, marked by deprivation, humiliation and racism. The many-member family lives together in cramped conditions. The men try to earn money with informal odd jobs and show great talent for improvisation. Margina was shot over a long period of time with a 3-person team. The film succeeds in getting surprisingly close to the people in their private everyday lives. The ...


2006 | 77 min | Drama
Ruza left her homeland Serbia over 30 years ago and lives in Zurich. Her everyday life takes place in a meticulously constructed world, until Ana appears one day. Ana, the young woman from Sarajevo, is beautiful, hungry for life, somehow lost – and she upsets Ruza's firmly established order. A tender friendship develops between the two headstrong women. Director Andrea Štaka takes an intimate look at three women in Switzerland who come from different parts of a country that no longer exists (the ...

2019 | 20 min | Drama
Romanian truck driver Stancu has given his nephew Dragan a second driving permit for their truck - a common practice in their company to extend legal driving times. But when Dragan is almost killed by microsleep at the wheel, Stancu suddenly realizes he has to take over. Torn between the pressure to deliver and his concern for Dragan, he becomes entangled in a web of white lies. "The director's clever and accomplished staging creates an almost documentary-like tone that suits the film exceedingly ...