Skip to main content

Damien Manivel

Director
Damien Manivel is a French filmmaker known for his work in the independent cinema scene. He made his feature film debut with "A Young Poet" in 2014, which received critical acclaim. Manivel is also known for his films "The Park" (2016) and "Isadora's Children" (2019). His works often explore themes of human relationships and emotions through a poetic lens. Manivel's unique filmmaking style has garnered him recognition at various film festivals and earned him several awards for his contributions to cinema.

Films

Isadora's Children

Isadora's Children

By Damien Manivel

2019 | 85 min | Independent

100 years ago, Isadora Duncan, pioneer of modern dance, choreographed a solo dance to deal with the traumatic accidental death of her children.

Recommended for you

Dance Fight Love Die: With Mikis On the Road

Dance Fight Love Die: With Mikis On the Road

2017 | 87 min | Independent

A man in an uninterrupted creative frenzy: composer Mikis Theodorakis is the enfant terrible of contemporary European music history. Here, Asteris Koutoulas ignores biopic conventions to weave archive material with grotesque fiction and the various interpretations of Theodorakis' music. Asteris Koutoulas has accompanied the composer, politician and folk hero Mikis Theodorakis since 1987 on his many journeys. Their personal friendship offers a deep insight into the turbulent life of a person that ...

Faltenrock

Faltenrock

2019 | 82 min | Documentary

What does aging mean in a society where people are living longer and longer? Using a friend’s camera, two young filmmakers follow frequent guests of Hamburg’s FALTENROCK party scene, where entry is restricted to those 60 and older. Christian, Mechthild, Christiane, and Volker fly to China, volunteer to help refugees, search for love, and then disappear onto Facebook for three hours. Coming to terms with one’s own age is always also a confrontation with society’s images of it. The documentary FALTENROCK ...

Gate to Heaven

Gate to Heaven

2003 | 88 min | Comedy

After her shift Nisha sneaks into the planes at night and entertains imaginary first class passengers. She meets the young Russian Alexej, who has fled to Germany and works under the table to make ends meet. Their nightly airplane fantasies draws them together, as Alexei dreams of flying - as a pilot.

Recycling Medea: Not an Opera Ballet Film

Recycling Medea: Not an Opera Ballet Film

2013 | 75 min | Music, Dance, Theater

While the classical play MEDEA by Euripides is performed on stage, young people on the streets of Athens fight against a state that steals all their opportunities. In associative form, the film interweaves the ancient myth of a mother who kills her children with images of violent street protests and lines from Anne Frank's diary. Six solo dancers - including an extraordinary Maria Kousouni as Medea - in expressive close-ups, in a mixture of classical ballet and modern expressive dance, interwoven ...

GDR Experimental: Heracles

GDR Experimental: Heracles

1984 | 10 min | Icons & Media Art

Lutz Dammbeck experiments with the boundaries between film, performance and media art. In the early 1980s, he works with dancer Fine Kwiatkowski to develop elements for his planned media collages – a central element of his “Herakles Concept”. This multi-layered project explores myths and political systems and their impact on society. In 1984, Dammbeck moved into an independent art space on Sredzkistraße in East Berlin, which was run by art historian Eugen Blume and artists such as Hans Scheib and ...

The Wheel

The Wheel

2017 | 9 min | Shorts

THE WHEEL, originally conceived as a dance performance, was developed by Sara Fortune and Daniela Lucato into a short film that combines philosophy and dance. Daniela Lucato, dancer, actress and producer, directed and conceived the choreography. The screenplay by Sara Fortuna, a language philosopher exploring the origins of language and body perception, is inspired by Lars von Trier's Dogville. The wheel, as a real object in the center of the stage, creates a purely symbolic conceptual space in ...

You Are Everything

You Are Everything

2016 | 98 min | Music, Dance, Theater

Journalist Georg and his girlfriend Vera meet DJ and bon vivant Dave and join his festival tour across Europe. At some point, Vera has to choose one of the two. At an electronic music festival, Berlin-based journalist Georg and his girlfriend Vera meet Dave Zuma, a DJ who loves to enjoy life to the fullest. As soon as the unusual trio enters Dave's old hippie campervan the journey of their lifetime begins. Their bumpy ride takes them from one festival to the next, across the Balkan states heading ...

The Impossible Picture

The Impossible Picture

2016 | 70 min | Drama

A childhood as it could have been. Fragments of a family history and family secrets. We experience a household full of women around grandmother Maria Steinwendner, who organizes weekly cooking clubs. Only there is never any cooking. Grandma Maria performs abortions at her home, covered by the noise of cooking classes.

A Partner to Call My Own

A Partner to Call My Own

2022 | 83 min | Documentary

Eni has danced all her life – with her husband, with friends, with the joy of rhythm. But after the death of her partner, everything changes. Suddenly she is alone on the dance floor, and the gap left by his absence is not only felt physically. To counteract her loneliness, she hires a “taxi dancer” – young men who dance with older women in exchange for money, giving them a sense of closeness and attention for a few hours. But what initially sounds like an arrangement for the dance floor raises deeper ...

Lifetimeshort

Lifetimeshort

2009 | 87 min | Comedy

Theater director Gesine Danckwart's feature debut LIFETIMESHORT is an ironic comedy about Berlin big city girls and how they cope with life and love in a late capitalist urban setting. ACHTUNG BERLIN 2009 Danckwart contrasts the women's tumultuous lives against a backdrop of cool, almost clinical-looking Berlin architecture. The city becomes another character in the story. Danckwart collaborated with her six actresses over the course of a year to develop the film's situations and dialogue. The result ...