Bulgaria Of All Places
2007 | 94 min | Biography
This documentary chronicles the life of writer Angelika Schrobsdorff's family, who fled from Berlin and Nazi Germany to Bulgaria in 1939.
Christo Bakalski
DirectorChristo Bakalski is a renowned Bulgarian actor and director known for his work in both film and theater. He has garnered critical acclaim for his performances in various films such as "The Lesson" and "3/4". Bakalski has also received several awards for his contributions to the film industry, including Best Actor at the Bulgarian Film Academy Awards. In addition to his acting career, he has also directed a number of successful theater productions, showcasing his versatility and talent in the performing arts.
Films
Recommended for you
Engel über Europa - Rilke als Gottsucher
2018 | 82 min | Biography
Throughout his life, Rilke looked to the spiritual and mythological traditions of the world for inspiration in his own search for God. Discouraged by his mother's dogmatic Catholicism, Rilke turned to esotericism and anthroposophy at an early age. In turn-of-the-century Munich, he lived in close proximity to people seeking to understand life, such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Rudolf Steiner, all of whom were on the search for an alternative to Christian forms of belief. His travels through ...
The Return of the Aramean People
2012 | 62 min | Documentary
"Tur Abdin" is what Aramaic Christians call their homeland in southeast Turkey, not far from the Syrian border. One of the earliest Christian settlements in the world, very few live there today. Most Aramaic Christians have fled war, violence and repression. Some even fled to Germany. Now, exiled Arameans from Göppingen want to return to southeastern Turkey to safeguard their cultural heritage and rebuild their destroyed villages. Director Anja Reiß accompanies them back home. "Migration is a constantly ...
The Dreamed Ones
2016 | 89 min | Documentary
The correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan forms the basis of the text. The story begins in Vienna in 1948, when she is 22 and he 27, and ends with Celan's suicide in 1971 in Paris. Two young actors, Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp, meet in a recording studio to read from their correspondence. The dramatically fluctuating feelings of the letters - between intoxication and fear of loss, delight and horror, closeness and strangeness - are passed on to the actors.
Gottes zerstreute Funken - Jüdische Mystik bei Paul Celan
2016 | 67 min | Biography
The film highlights decisive stations and influences in the poet's life. Among them Celan's trip to Israel, where he visited the grave of Jewish mystic Isaac Luria (1534-1572) in Safed, whose spiritual worldview had a lasting influence on Celan. Luria postulated that God withdrew from the world after creation. But also the few remaining rays of light were still too powerful, so that the first forms of being broke. These sparks or shards are to be recognized and found by the mystic. "Rüdiger Sünner ...
My Father, the Revolution and Me
2013 | 82 min | Biography
"With its bitter-sweet atmosphere and stoicism in the face of heartbreaking memories, the film is reminiscent of Marjanne Satrapi’s 'Persepolis'" (themovingarts.com) In 1980, the filmmaker's birth is overshadowed by the revolution. "I was born in the middle of a dream." But another refrain runs through the film: "What am I to do with this legacy?" This family drama is a quest of identity and politics that takes us from Turkey in the 1970s to Switzerland in the 21st century, dealing with exile, prison, ...
Paradies! Paradies!
2016 | 78 min | Documentary
The Kurdish Kurdwin grew up in Austria and takes a critical view of this visit "home". Filming, she tries to find out why her father is euphoric about Kurdistan. In 1991 Kurdwin Ayub fled Iraq with her family to Austria. Almost 25 years later she accompanies her father on a journey to his former home. While he contemplates a returning to live permanently in Iraq, Kurdwin and her cousins feel like strangers in their own homeland. An intimate, sometimes bizarre and sobering portrait of the generation ...
Room Without a View
2021 | 73 min | Documentary
A thought-provoking gaze of the exploitative migration and the terrible dilemmas facing women who must choose between earning money and caring for their own children. The film drives the realities underlying the domestic work and care solutions found by Middle Eastern countries, such as Lebanon. These solutions do not address continuing gender inequalities, and all too often rest on the exploitation and even dehumanization of the women who actually provide the care of children and do all the domestic ...
The Last Playboy
2023 | 84 min | Biography
Maurizio Candidi is 70 years old and presents himself as the last representative of a fading lifestyle: an old-school playboy devoted to luxury, women, and the promise of eternal seduction. He claims to have slept with more than a thousand women — a figure that seems less a statistic than part of his carefully crafted self-mythology. The film follows Maurizio through his daily routines between elegant hotels, glamorous seaside resorts, and memories of past conquests. Through conversations and encounters, ...
A Fleeting Passage To The Orient
1999 | 82 min | Biography
Rigorous and engrossing, Ruth Beckermann's documentary retraces the steps of Austria's restless "sad empress" Elizabeth during trips to Egypt in both 1885 and 1891. When the camera gazes from the deck of the ship towards the endless horizon of the Mediterranean, the image of a woman who travelled the globe without pause takes shape. Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, also gradually disappears from view, as it were: from the age of 30 she refused to be photographed.
Birds of September
2013 | 99 min | Documentary
People are invited to share a personal moment. It is a thoughtful portrait of some of the city's inhabitants as they sit at the back of the van and express their innermost thoughts. Sarah Francis' documentary BIRDS OF SEPTEMBER is her debut film and was screened at CPH: DOX and the Art of the Real New York. "A portrait of a city and the people who live there, which amazingly enough manages to unite a number of otherwise highly different genres into a unified whole. An original and accomplished ...