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 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.
How does the omnipresence of war affect life? The film looks for answers in the “American Way” of everyday life in the vast deserts of Utah, where the U.S. Army are testing new weapons systems.
In the middle of the barren Utah desert, is the Dugway Proving Grounds – a top-secret military testing facility. Bound to this place are the lives of a soldier, a military chaplain, a father searching for his missing son, and a survivor of the atomic bomb. Their fates and fortunes reveal a country scarred by war.
The cutting down of a cherry tree becomes the starting point of an intimate dialogue about transgenerational trauma between a mother and a daughter. The line between the need for investigation and the desire for healing becomes blurry when a persistent camera depicts the felling of the tree. The short documentary is an attempt to find a shared language for the unspeakable consequences of child sexual abuse within my own family. Content warning: The film contains descriptions of experiences of sexual violence.
An unpleasant examination by a meticulous doctor leads to a supposedly inevitable medical intervention that leaves the young patient scarred in body and soul.
She knew this day would come and the choice she'd have to make. But as it finally comes, Maya cannot wrap her head around it. A mole – it's so small, so insignificant, just a mark... How can it be so hard to part from it? Can Maya ever feel whole again when a bit of her is taken away?
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.
I recently saw someone that looked like you. I realised quickly that he was not you – but he moved like you. Ran his hands through his hair like you. And had the same backpack in the same shabby state. So I decided to follow your not-you for a while.
Diabetes: Matthew Lancit lives in constant fear of the complications of his disease, so he simply anticipates the body horror himself. The result is equally funny and disturbing.
What started as a nostalgic film diary about his diabetes has been gradually contaminated by Matthew's anticipation of possible futures. Introducing monstrous elements into his family home movies, he re-appropriates tropes from the body horror films of his youth to create an image of the invisible disease.
Is ADHS the fashionable diagnosis of a society geared towards efficiency and Ritalin the perfect doping agent? A personal journey to the heart of chaos and back – from a deliberately female perspective.
What does the rise in the diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and other mental illnesses since the 90s have to do with the efficiency-driven and dumbed-down civilisation in which the grid of normal is becoming ever narrower? Are ADHD drugs the doping of the performance society? And who actually determines what is normal and what is not?
With five different female ADHD sufferers, Sick Girls gets to the bottom of these questions and gives insight into the personal difficulties of living with ADHD. Director Gitti Grüter examines their own ADHD and interacts with their protagonists partly in front and partly from behind the camera, addressing chaos, lack of concentration, relationship problems, addiction, depression, insomnia and impulsivity. Gitti builds a bridge between the hardships and joys of the affected women and a society that blows back at them in the form of stigmatisation and stereotyping of the feminine and the desolate.
Through its cinematic devices, Sick Girls gives the audience a momentary sense of having ADHD and digs into the social contexts of this “anomaly”.
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.
The sun is setting in the jungle. The little monkey rocks from leaf to leaf. His dreams are wild and colourful … A filmic lullaby that definitely won’t make anyone fall asleep.
The sun sets and the eyes are closing. Rocking from one green leaf to the next, the little monkey glides gently to sleep. Suddenly, the world of dreams gets darker, more colourful and wild. Mysterious plants, creatures and shapes line the trajectory through the night.
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.
The film focuses on the life experiences of people who have a personal connection to the border with the United States and have ended up stranded in the Mexican city of Tijuana.
The short film Cuando llegue la neblina (When the Fog Comes) portrays the lives of people from the Mexican border city of Tijuana. Through a combination of photographs, animations, and audio recordings, the film delves into the daily realities of four individuals who have different connections to the Mexican-American border.
We meet Isna and Miche, two migrants who fled from Haiti, leaving their children and families behind in their home country. They undertook the exhausting journey through eleven countries to reach Mexico, hoping to get closer to their dream of the “American Dream”. We encounter José Luís, a Mexican man who, after eight failed attempts to cross the border, now waiting for the next fog to try again. We also meet Gustavo, a lifeguard who rescues migrants from the waters as they attempt to swim around the border in the sea.
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.