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.
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.
In Blind Date 2.0, Paul once again receives the filmmaker at his home – this time in order to shoot a sex date. Far from the spectacularly pornographic, but also from amateur porn, there is room to first of all clarify preferences, and consensus is established. Since both men are rather on the passive side and the double dildo fails to win over the visitor, they agree on a blowjob and find a practicable middle ground in mutual masturbation. Blind Date 2.0 does not aim at producing arousal but constitutes a doubly empathetic approach – that of the filmmaker to his protagonist, and that of the protagonist to his rather monosyllabic visitor. In targeted, unspectacular framing, the film captures the sex-positive in the ordinary, in the non-standardised, and above all in the context of social interaction: comprehensible, moving, and with a memorable cigarette afterwards.
A shaman, half human, half animal, performs a breakneck dance in the jungle. Ingeniously, he tries to fool the crocodiles in the river to reach the other bank.
The film’s stop-motion animation puppets are made using Taiwan’s unique papermaking technique rooted in traditional funeral ceremonies. At the beginning of the film, a shadow puppet mirror transforms into a shaman-like animal dancer. The film uses the perspective of a fly to create a montage film language using the metaphor of the compound eye. Through the use of choreography in the style of the Taiwanese “yi zhen” folk dance, the film portrays the Southeast Asian folktale The Mousedeer Crossing the River through multiple perspectives, reinterpreting the story’s layered facets across cultures.
The audience views the narrative through the vision of the fly’s compound eye, where the folktale represents a form of container, filled with symbolic metaphors such as the mirror and shadows, reflecting the flow of cultural identity, ethnicity and the transitional nature of local and global contexts. The film interprets cultures from around the world and while seemingly different on the surface, they in fact reveal a similar structure at their core.
A poetic investigation of one of the largest e-waste recycling sites in the world as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political, and technological processes.
A landscape of electronic equipment leftovers, embedded in biting clouds of smoke, burnt earth, and dirty water.
In Agbogbloshie – one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites situated in the middle of Accra – electronics are dismantled and burnt in order to return their metals to the industrial recycling cycles.
In between, an observer who, by means of acoustic field research, investigates this place as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political, and technological processes and questions this from a spiritual perspective.
A Taiwanese boss and Burmese laborers seek ways of getting rich by shrimp farming. However a life gone on the process. It's all about trust, gender power, and culture conflicts.
With 20 years of experience in shrimp farming in Taiwan, Du came to Myanmar alone. Even though he saw only endless wilderness before him, he believed that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” nothing is impossible on this earth. He did not expect that what followed were white powders and guns.
A Burmese-Chinese girl, Sue, who also dreamt of shrimp farming, decided to settle down in the shrimp farm her father had started to develop 20 years ago, after the marriage to her Burmese husband, Jojo. She was determined to carry out the unfulfilled ambition of her father. Struggling to confront the false accusation, Du encountered Sue by chance. Together, they decided to farm and rear shrimps in the wilderness and build their “Diamond Marine World.”
It took five years to shoot and produce this film, recording the turns of humanity and the conflicts falling one after the other like the rain in Myanmar.
Vasyl is a former ski jumper who now works as a coach at the ski jumping school for children in the Carpathians. He is a loner, and sports is his whole life. Zhenya is Vasyl's favourite trainee. In the last 5 years, he spends a lot of energy making her a champion. With her success, his dreams can come true. When the girl grows up, she decides to try in another area of life not connected to sports. Vasyl's work seems to no longer make sense. But he finds the strength to start all over again.
Emile Zuckerkandl talks about his grandmother's salon, Hitler's arrival, and his escape to Algeria. A network of personal memories interwoven with world history.
Emile Zuckerkandl jotted down in his diary, “I write it down, so that I can remember it later.” Eighty years later, his memories are vivid and clear when he talks about his grandmother's salon, Hitler's arrival after the “Anschluss,” and his escape to Algeria. Rainer Frimmel stays very close to his charismatic protagonist in recording a network of personal memories interwoven with world history.
While buying an apartment, a pair of siblings meet a woman who looks exactly like their dead sister. An intriguing true crime story unfolds bit by bit.
A divine premonition leads two sisters to buy an apartment in the small Swedish town of Gullspång. To their surprise, the seller looks identical to their older sister who committed suicide 30 years earlier. What begins as an eerie story of family reunification soon becomes a Pandora's Box as all three women's lives spiral out of control.
In Denmark the police offer voluntary boot camps for girls. 12-year-old Tatheer from Copenhagen takes part. Far away from home, she will have grown a few centimetres before the end.
12-year-old Tatheer embarks on a week-long police boot camp for girls from a social housing estate in Copenhagen. Far from home, deep in the woods, she navigates gruelling rituals, elusive social dynamics, and personal setbacks to find her place in this tender and revealing coming-of-age story.
Design as a political act? In this animated collage, a contemporary advertising graphic designer explores the uncompromising work of the photomontage pioneer and anti-fascist John Heartfield.
The graphic designer Stefanie is in a creative crisis. Boring advertising assignments and a boss who does not value her work. On a visit to a museum, she is magically attracted by the satirical photomontages of the world-famous colleague and Nazi opponent John Heartfield. Then the miracle happens. She ends up in his studio, where she finally picks up scissors and paper again. An adventurous journey through Heartfield's extraordinary life 100 years ago begins.
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.
The competition between the two brothers begins at the seaside. As brothers, they know each other best and become each other's most prominent opponents. The younger brother admires his older brother's natural talents. However, the older brother secretly has a “fatal” weakness. In the three rounds of the competition, lasting two minutes each, they express their secrets to each other.
A woman lives alone with her cat in the city. The small miracles of life can be found in all kinds of everyday moments, and loneliness turns into a happy melody.
When the war starts, 12-year-old Niki finds refuge in a Kharkiv underground station. Monotonous, oppressive days – until Vika enters his life. The tender connection gives new courage.
On a cold February morning, 12-year-old Niki and his family arrive at the Kharkiv metro station to take shelter from the terrifying war raging outside. For Niki's family, daylight is synonymous with mortal danger, and the boy is not allowed to leave the station premises, living under the constant glow of their neon lights. While aimlessly wandering around the abandoned cars and full platforms, Niki meets Vika (11), and a new world opens up to him. As their bond strengthens, the children find the courage once again to feel the sun on their faces.
Rosl’s Suitcase is the story of my Jewish grandmother, who left Vienna for New York with my father in 1939 and of my own fact-finding quest about truth and what I had been told.
Rosl’s Suitcase is the story of my Viennese and Jewish grandmother, who emigrated to New York with my teenage father in 1939. The contents of the suitcase reveal discrepancies in what I had been told. With this discovery, I begin my quest to find out what really happened and what had been hidden.
Rosl’s Suitcase interweaves current-day Vienna with home movies and recordings by three generations of women: great aunt Ada's 1947 movies after her arrival in the U.S.; Aunt Helen's audio descriptions of her youth in Vienna and immigration to New York; my own 1960's Northern California coming-of-age 8mm films and light show movies.
French-American singer of Viennese origin, Adah Dylan Jungk, reads/performs Rosl's letters against backdrops and front projections of the Vienna High Court, the University courtyard and wartime films of the city. We follow Adah to “locations of memory”, crosscutting between places today and the same places shown in historical film archives. The city's landmarks are recharged through the prism of the pre-and post-war Vienna of my grandmother, father and my own lens.
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.