
The Other Rio
2018 | 88 min | Documentary
The spectacle of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are in full swing. But the grim contrast of poverty is only a few blocks away.


2018 | 88 min | Documentary
The spectacle of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are in full swing. But the grim contrast of poverty is only a few blocks away.

2015 | 30 min | Documentary
He doesn’t feel comfortable at home and that is why he often escapes to visit a friend, Amelia, an old woman who wears a cap and lives in a small house on the hillside. There she talks about her life, her family and her dreams. He reads her her letters. But life is not always so simple: Amelia has money troubles. Youdid Kahveci's short film POEM OF THE DAY debuted at Achtung Berlin. Growing up in East Berlin in the 1980s, Kahveci found her way to film after detours doing gardening and diving and ...

2015 | 55 min | Documentary
When fighting, Ibo seems anything but unfocused. For half a year Vedran Kos accompanies his exhausting preparations for the first amateur boxing match and talks about the emotional but also pragmatic hurdles of the sport. Today the time has come, the day of the fight that will decide everything. It’s easy to say the most important match is always the next one – but for Ibo at this instant it is really true that nothing else counts. Depending on the outcome, he feels the threat of megalomania or ...

2011 | 74 min | Documentary
Father Steven puts all his energy into his small kiosk in the middle of the township. Meanwhile, daughter "Moskito" struggles through the turmoil of puberty and dreams of a career as a professional soccer player or paleontologist. A family portrait, away from the flashy World Cup broadcasts, about two South African generations, their dreams, disappointments and realities. "One-thousand-watt personalities combined with beautiful lensing make MEANWHILE IN MAMELODI a star thesis project from tyro ...

2015 | 77 min | Icons & Media Art
The controversial Soviet physicist Boris Zolotov left science to start a movement. He has gathered hundreds of disciples around him. Like many in the group, young Ekaterina was led there by many unanswered questions. Together with Boris Zolotov, she takes part in hour-long swimming rituals and night-time theater performances and discusses concepts of happiness in today´s Russia. SWIMMERS is an observation of this extraordinary attempt to achieve and maintain collective belief, on the border of ...

2021 | 118 min | Independent
Heiko's mother Belinda suffers from keratoconus, a rare eye disease. She could soon go completely blind. Belinda's eyesight could be saved with an expensive operation - but the insurance company won't cover it. For Heiko, this marks the beginning of an odyssey through the Berlin bar world: in order to raise the money for his mother's operation, he faces the best dart players in the city, at first reluctantly, but then with growing ambition, euro after euro. They, however, pursue completely different ...

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 ...

2021 | 53 min | Documentary
Urbanization, concrete, stone, disappearing green. Next to the most central point of Berlin - Alexanderplatz - we find the building complex Haus der Statistik, which slowly withered into ruin over the past 12 years. But now the building with the red lettering STOP WARS, in which the official statistics were made in the GDR, is slowly awakening from its slumber. City administration, urban planners, artists and civil society come together to create space for art, culture and social affairs. Can this ...

2014 | 90 min | Documentary
Twenty years ago, at the age of 11, Leonardo wanted to become a professional soccer player to escape the poverty and violence of the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The film that was made at the time miraculously made his dream come true. In 1994, 11 year-old Leonardo, was portrayed in the Award-winning documentary Solo –the law of the favela. His dream was to become soccer players, to escape the poverty and violence of the slum in Rio de Janeiro. As a result of the film, Leonardo was invited to join ...

2013 | 94 min | Documentary
Can Jan reconcile his family ambitions and tough training regimen with a “normal” adolescence? Huge fans of Roger Federer, the Guler family dreams of boosting their youngest son Jan on top of the world of tennis. As classmates start an apprenticeship or move on to high school, Jan starts professional tennis camp. Over a period of five years, we witness up close how the Guler family deals with the sport, family and social demands of a professional tennis career. We watch as teenager Jan develops ...