A ghost ride through Finnish TV archives of the 1960s grazes the moon landing, American TV shows, a war in Africa. But how to connect with the world when dancing is forbidden?!
The anonymous narrator is a kind of web-adventurous flâneuse, neurotic and endlessly curious. A disturbance in the proprioception, which is the ability to sense the position, movement and location of the body and its parts, makes her perceive the world in a new way. Seemingly random anecdotes found on the internet and instructions from her cryptic physiotherapist start to come together in surprising ways. The found material forms a mosaic that reflects a world full of gazes, rules and technologies that separate us. Lines from the present and the distant past take our narrator to the 1960s, where medieval dance bans, televised wars, lost bones, space utopias and American TV stars collide. This film reflects how we can be and live in the world within ourselves and with each other. With those who are near and with those who are far. Along with all this, the film recommends dancing to everyone.
A journey through places and times that shaped the life of Turkish writer and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan. She writes against silence, especially in exile.
Shattered photos, excerpts from newspapers and pieces of words become voices that spread through the alleys of a city until they reach the house of a writer, who’s writing a page. These fragmented voices tell the story of Aslı Erdogan, a Turkish author forced to live in exile in Europe after being imprisoned for her political ideas.
The voices narrate her life, from her childhood in Istanbul and her feminist commitment to the years as a researcher in Switzerland, the fugue to Brazil before returning to Istanbul, the heart of her lost country. Footage of travel and migration in search of work, images from physics laboratories, videos of protests against the authorities in Istanbul: these materials get mixed in a visual and sound flow becoming the essence of our collective memory, shared by every discriminated person, among them Aslı Erdogan during her exile. Meanwhile, the process of writing has erupted: the page contains words.
The most profound memories are sometimes the most deceptive. That’s what Brett Allen Smith finds out as he keeps replaying the funeral of the family dogs. A baffling confrontation.
Recasting his newborn son and dog as himself and his childhood pets, a filmmaker confronts his own false memories through a collage of film, digital and video game footage.
The formation and history of Lake Baikal in Siberia are re-imagined with hand-made animation, featuring the voice of a Buryat woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat-Mongolian language.
A look back at a GDR childhood by the sea, where boundaries and freedoms were always close to each other: a poetic autobiography, condensed in hundreds of watercolours.
A coastal childhood during the dictatorship. A search for traces and a bittersweet declaration of love. Based on hundreds of watercolour paintings, this hand-animated film speaks of departure, return and remembrance, inspired by biography. A “Heimatfilm” from the shore that was a death strip.
One day the dachshund lady Dede dies. The little boy mourns her and doesn’t know how to deal with this feeling. In the end he discovers that Dede is dead, but not completely gone.
How does one deal with the unexpected death of a loved one? This film tells the story of a boy and his dog Dede, and shows their final moments together before Dede dies (...and after).
Els is in her late forties, divorced and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, that she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible.
Falling is a lyrical, found-footage-based testimony from a mother who faces not only the taboos surrounding motherhood but also the most difficult situation in her life.
This desktop video essay examines how the media illustrate the issue of abortion. Clicking through photo databases and magazines reveals the consequences of suggestive images.
What do abortions look like? What kind of images shape our view on them? And where do these images come from? The desktop video essay getty abortions examines how German and Austrian media illustrate the topic of abortion, browsing through stock photo databases, teen magazines and personal documents of a real abortion experience. It jumps from the early 2000s to the late 19th century, seeks out feminist knowledge and chats with fictional characters. But one question remains: Why does no one look into the camera?
Three filmmakers research the history of a chemical factory in Cologne-Kalk. Off- and online archives teach them the art of weeding out and throwing away, the art of daring the gap.
In their documentary film, the three filmmakers Lea Sprenger, Franca Pape and Amelie Vierbuchen set out to find material about the Kalk chemical factory in Cologne. During their research at the Archive “Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv zu Köln”, they meet archivist Dr. Christian Hillen, who has a lot to say. While the archivist struggles with the 16mm film, the filmmakers dig through the chaos of sources and capitulate to the resistance of the material. Who decides which stories are saved or thrown away? A fast paced film about searching, throwing away, about gaps and mistakes and about one's own inability, which is repeatedly met with self-irony.
From 1974 to 1977, a huge trade fair centre was built in Lagos. Today nature and humans are reclaiming the ruins. Plants proliferate, small crafts flourish – a trans-historical site visit.
It was meant to be a place of trade, exchange and sharing. Now, there are flooded rooms, flowers and weeds and snails and birds, cut fruit and cut wood, cooks and carpenters, an artificial lake and football fields, Ema's memory of what once was here and Kendo's view of what one can see.
“The world in one garden” – with this claim of omnipotence, the construction of the Botanical Garden in Dahlem began. The deeper one enters, the clearer the traces of imperialist thinking emerge.
The film Showhouse portrays the botanical garden as a magical place, the charm of which lies in the interweaving of time spaces and world areas, and at the same time explores the abysmal nature of the botanical project. Plants have been shipped to European cities since the beginning of colonialism, gathered there and put on display. The exhibition of plants from around the world was intended to provide the metropolitan public with an image of the colonised territories. In addition, plants were cultivated and gardeners and colonial officials were trained to guarantee their economic productivity on the plantations in the colonies. Thus, botanical gardens were a part of European colonialism and its legitimisation.
A look back at the history of the botanical garden is combined with a look at present ideas of the future: while colonial plant collections of the late 19th century tell of the categorisation and domination of the “other”, in times of climate catastrophe, notions of gardens expanding into space, soothe fears about the limits of late capitalist civilisations and impending catastrophe.
A young refugee is stabbed to death in the north German town of Celle. An approach to structural racism via investigation files, football and the filmmaker's growing up in Celle.
The 15-year-old Yezidi Arkan Hussein Khalaf is stabbed to death in Celle in northern Germany. The police questions, interrogates, autopsies, searches, reconstructs, preserves, records – 1700 pages. An approach to structural racism via investigation files, football and growing up in Celle. The essayistic documentary reads the files and asks about their performativity: Which terms find their way into the verdict, and which get lost? It examines the imprints of those writing the narrative about the crime. Major football events from 1990 to 2014 serve as chroniclers of the formation of German identity: from Helmut Kohl, the attacks of the early 90s, to the patriotism of the summer fairy tale of 2006, and the myth of the diverse world champion in 2014. It contrasts this with Arkan's family. How did they experience the night of the crime? Why is it clear to them that it was racism? The film dives through files, newspaper articles, archive material, images of small-town idylls and football matches. It explores the migration history of the Yezidi as so-called “Gastarbeiter” in Celle, forgotten right-wing attacks and the filmmaker's own growing up in Celle. As part of the white-dominant society, she feels her own longing: let it be a coincidence that it hit Arkan. What’s behind this longing?
There is Portugal, there is the Portuguese language and there is a Ukrainian filmmaker who learns the language and approaches the role of the potential migrant. There is also a play of words: zangar and o zangāo. How is it possible to express such an empowering emotion like anger in the fragile attempts of a beginner? The video essay is woven from the filmmaker's narration, language classes, personal videos and archival images from Kyiv – revealing the split reality of anyone who is finding a safe place abroad while longing for home, which is under the constant danger of war.
Tricky Disco traces various forms of spatial and cultural appropriation. The film unmasks the attempted appropriation of the techno and house movement as a “German cultural asset”.
Tricky Disco traces various forms of spatial and cultural appropriation, initially following the traces in the author's biography.
The film focuses on (self-)empowerment through participation in the techno subculture of the late nineties. However, the emancipatory and political potential of this subculture is countered by another dimension in the course of the narrative: using photogrammetric images and analogue video footage, the work draws parallels in the urban development of Berlin and Frankfurt. It unmasks the attempted appropriation of the techno and house movement as a “German cultural asset” and depicts how efforts are made to monetise it through hasty musealisation.
When the West was still wild there was room there for gay love stories that are missing in today’s history books. A queer rewriting of U.S. pioneer tales.
At the dawn of the American West, two men – one a little-known Creole, the other a closeted historical icon – entered into a volatile relationship that spanned a continent. The Wages of John Pernia is their story: a gay Western romance that emerges from between the lines of official history.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.