Two research trips into a possible future of humanity and the very real past of a family history combine to form a narrative about our relationship to time.
A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet. Using the father’s travel journal as a guide, and re-contextualising archival footage and photographs, this film explores our yearning to bridge a gap: the gap between parents and children, between points in space, and between the present and the past.
The little beetle tries unsuccessfully to get out of the sink. When the tap is opened, the watery whirlpool takes him into the wide world. The beginning of a wonderful journey.
Little Beetle's attempt to escape from the sink has been unsuccessful, but the trouble that comes in the form of water will prove to be the beginning of a wonderful journey.
A storm of queer norm-busting archive images. The creative arrangement is as sensual as the material, including purple colour explosions and a jazz music leitmotif.
Between birth and death, is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. The right to love is controlled and regulated by how we live. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.
Leipzig, 1989. A young punk, detained in a mental hospital, longs to be close to her boyfriend. A doomed love story in the midst of the collapse of the GDR.
Leipzig, 1989. Margarethe, a young punk opposed to the East German regime, is detained in a psychiatric hospital. She dreams of breaking out to join the man she loves – a punk musician named Heinrich. Though the regime's days may well be numbered, the Stasi informants are more present than ever.
A religious statue comes alive and unites with a boneless girl. They leave the village together with many other figures that have stepped down from the altars.
One day, all the statues in the area come to life. They leave the roadside shrines and pedestals and calmly set off straight ahead, all in the same direction. They do not even stop for a moment. People watch the phenomenon with growing anxiety. None of them knows where they are going and why. Only a little girl with a boneless body marvels at the procession of the unusual figures with pure fascination. They walk without muscles, although they should not be able to walk. How strange!
A short animated documentary exploring the immigration experience through the eyes of a little Israeli girl learning how to swim with clothes on in the Netherlands.
Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers takes us along on her epic quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late.
Beneath our feet lies a mystery. A complex underground network of mycorrhizal fungi keeps our ecosystem alive by exchanging nutrients and carbon with almost all plants on Earth. Remarkably, no one knows exactly how these sophisticated and ancient systems operate, or how they are affected by climate change.
The Underground Astronaut follows evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, named one of the 2022 TIME100 Next Innovators, on her quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late. A fragrant and high-stakes journey into the soil. “No fungi, no future.”
The Underground Astronaut is part of Ammodo Docs, a series of short documentaries about original minds in arts and science.
A Polish fishing village in deceptive winter silence … This expressively designed everyday mosaic of a village community talks of Anka, Jesus, warmth of heart and coldness of feeling.
It grows slowly as an icicle, but one day, it drops and crashes. Anka loves cats. And Jesus. In a winter silence, the lagoon freezes and the unspoken resurfaces like a crack in the ice. A mosaic portrait of a small fisherman's village where human to human, human to animal, animal to animal interdepend on a delicate balance of warm tender care and cold emotional cruelty. An eerie story of loneliness and community narrated with magical realism.
In 2043, humanity launches the spaceship Zoopticon to send a greeting to distant galaxies. An extraterrestrial opera with cheering colours and radiant pop charm in the darkness of space.
Imagine you are the only being in the Universe floating through outer space, all on your own. This is the predicament of the Zoopticon, a spaceship with a face, filled with artefacts of life and culture from Earth. It's also the perspective of five mutated singing animals who don't know of each other's existence – and that they are all on the Zoopticon, just rooms apart. When they finally encounter each other, they realise they are all living souvenirs from a mysterious planet called Earth that have been shot into space as part of a theme park for an interstellar audience. They decide to emancipate themselves.
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.