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.
Nahid is 15 years old and fleeing the Taliban with her family. Stranded in a Bosnian border town, she meets Ferida, an elderly bosnian woman struggling with her own war trauma.
August 2021. The world watches as the Taliban come back to power in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people flee. Many of them end up trapped in the non-EU state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Like Nahid, a 15-year-old girl who is stranded in this nowhere place after a nerve-wracking flight from Herat. The voice messages from home increasingly sound like a distant echo. But there is no time for nostalgia in this daily life between illegality and pushbacks. There is just one goal: get her family away from this ramshackle camp. Luckily, there are people like Ferida and the shady but good-hearted coffee shop owner Elvir in town.
Ferida lives right at the border and as she watches people return humiliated from their attempts to cross the border, memories of her own past slowly come back to her.
While Ferida loses herself in reminiscence, Nahid discovers that the cycle of war and loss connects her to the place more than she expected.
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.
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.
Film material from the colonial era in Togo is screened in public at the locations where it was shot. What does it tell, what does it conceal? A painful confrontation with German history.
Shortly before the First World War, the German “Africa explorer” and film director Hans Schomburgk embarked on an unprecedented film expedition to West Africa to shoot adventure and documentary films in the exotic setting in the north of the then-German colony of Togo. To this day, his films remain virtually unknown in Togo.
More than a century later, guided by the report of actress Meg Gehrts, we travel with a mobile cinema to the original locations of Schomburgk's film adventures. Together with Togolese viewers, we want to question the film images regarding their historical background and the effects of colonialism. What do they show? And what do they conceal about Togoland, which at the time was praised as the “model colony” of the German Empire?
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.