A box of film material from Tito-era Yugoslavia becomes a narrative engine. With dry wit and philosophical verve, this essay burrows through family and contemporary history.
The sixties and the seventies of the 20th century in our former country, a country that ceased to be. A young family moves from a rural environment to a small Slovenian town, where factories are being built and the need for a workforce is increasing. The brothers are growing up in that shaky but magical in-between, soaked in the everyday rhythms of the community, infused with the ideology of the time. Then, it happens: the sudden spectrum of film; the mystique of time itself.
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 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.