
Uferfrauen - Lesbian Life and Love in the GDR
2020 | 116 min | Documentary
Six very different lesbian women talk about their lives and loves in the socialist system of the GDR.


2020 | 116 min | Documentary
Six very different lesbian women talk about their lives and loves in the socialist system of the GDR.

2017 | 98 min | Documentary
The 46-year old Nguyen Van Cuong and his family live on a self-made cabin built on a raft offshore in Northern Vietnam's Ha Long Bay. For him life on the water is pretty normal - his family has slept, cooked, and worked here for generations. The Vietnamese Ha Long Bay in northern Vietnam became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 and welcomes millions of tourists from all over the world every year. "The thematic superstructure speaks volumes, even though, or perhaps precisely because Duc has remained ...

2016 | 90 min | Documentary
Young, gay, and conservative, Mario Roellig is a witnesses to the atrocities committed in the GDR. He guides groups through the Stasi prison where he was once incarcerated. A love affair with a politician from West-Berlin made him try to flee to the West, but he got unlucky and was detained at the famous Stasi prison Berlin Hohenschoenhausen. Today Roellig confronts GDR aficionados and is also confronted by people who still believe in social utopias. And he tries to overcome his hurt feelings: ...

2011 | 30 min | Documentary
Arrested, interrogated, persecuted, suppressed. At the Hohenschönhausen Memorial in Berlin, eyewitnesses recall the Stasi methods used during arrest. All of them remain traumatized. Their accusations are directed at the former SED regime. Conversely, former Stasi employees deny that any injustice occurred. In the film, both sides confront each other. A battle for the interpretation of the past begins. Personal memories, however, show that history has many facets. But it is the dialogue between victims ...

2009 | 64 min | Documentary
This ambitious directorial debut chronicles lesbian lifestyles and social networking in Vienna in the 1950s and 60s. In those years, Vienna was a drab and traditional place. The scene - if it existed at all - was male- oriented, and the few bars where women did meet were not particularly inviting. Lesbian life was characterized by invisibility and, if anything, was criminalized. Three eyewitnesses of that era talk in an eloquently and refreshingly (self-)ironic way about what it was like to feel ...

2019 | 66 min | Documentary
What happens when a very popular village priest decides after 27 years of successful community work to finally face a lifelong issue and publicly announces his transgender identity? The rumors that he was wearing women's clothes forces pastor Hans-Gerd Spörkel to take a break. Shortly thereafter, his wife separates from him, and the village turns their backs on him. Half a year later, she resolutely returns as Elke Spörkel and holds her first service as a woman. After a controversial discussion, ...

2012 | 26 min | Drama
At the centre of this film is a young transperson, his question about his own identity and his desire to belong - even if you deviate slightly from the norm. Alicia (Ekaterina Tafel) is 15 years old and lives at a group home for youth with special needs. She wants to become a singer and longs for recognition. One day, a new teen, Mika, is seated at the dinner table. Alicia notices that this boy not only pays attention to her, but is also somehow different. A flirtation begins, but when Alicia walks ...

2022 | 83 min | Documentary
SOULS OF A RIVER follows a traveller back through the landscape of memory along the Evros River, where water, reeds and empty roads become a terrain of return. Moving as a stranger in his own country, he searches for the self that once left this border region behind. The search brings him to a forensic doctor who works in the river itself, recovering the traces of people who died while trying to cross. From a brown envelope come a cross, a ring and a wristwatch; elsewhere, unidentified bodies remain ...

2024 | 95 min | Documentary
DEAR BEAUTIFUL BELOVED looks at wartime Ukraine through the people left with the hardest tasks: the weak who cannot flee, the volunteers who move the dead, and the families waiting for news. Juri Rechinsky follows ordinary journeys made extraordinary by fear, distance and loss, keeping the film close to daily survival. A driver and a student carry fallen soldiers back to their families, while a young mother tries to reach Budapest with her two children and elderly women take shelter for a few days ...

1999 | 93 min | Drama
Walter is a man in his late 50s for whom reality is somehow slipping away. In GDR times he was the director of an industrial collective, but now his life's work is a ghostly ruin. Walter is stunned by a world that has discarded him - and an inner rampage has begun. With Hilmar Thate as Walter, Cornelia Schmaus as Sylvia, Henriette Heinze as Gina, and Dirk Borchardt as Rene. "Andreas Kleinert's calm yet powerful cinematography portrays not only the lack of perspective and stagnation of the dismantled ...

1988 | 42 min | Icons & Media Art
Three artists who moved from East Germany to West Berlin in the mid-1980s are the focus of this documentary. Cornelia Schleime, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling and Hans Scheib were part of the alternative art scene in East Germany and resisted state dictates. But what did the change to a new social system mean for their artistic identity? How did their strategies and perspectives change in the West, where market mechanisms and a different culture of self-staging suddenly prevailed? In THE PAINTER CAME FROM ...