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.
Far from the sea, a theater engineer builds a fully functional steampunk submarine with his friends. While escaping social reality, he questions the meaningfulness of our actions.
Theatre engineer Elias builds a fully functional steampunk submarine with his friends. While Nico rescues people from the waves of the Mediterranean, the 70-year-old artist Jim advises: “Don't do it. Don't fix cars. Rather, build something you really want to.” Elias asks himself: Is there a decision to be made between self-realisation and selfless action? On what does responsibility towards individuals or a larger society depend?
About Water and Dreams is a philosophical journey that questions the meaningfulness of our actions and dares to dream publicly in our dreamless society.
The objects in a film prop warehouse trigger stories in our minds. But what stories are told by African objects and racist figures? Which shelf do you put them in?
An array of social and professional milieus have grown up at the three prop houses Fundus Studio Babelsberg, Requisitenfundus Delikatessen Berlin and FTA Props in Hamburg. Each depot has a different logic and its own particular community with its own experiences in dealing with things. Susanne, Miu, Andreas and the three Peters are experts in moving, processing, sorting and presenting up to 100,000 different items.
Lamps, cups, sofas, collection tins, flags, toy fish, plastic flowers, clocks, fake oil paintings and other film props blossom in unimaginable variety.
All this stuff changes hands countless times as it migrates from an old-world analogue order to diverse new ones. On the internet, film props mutate into descriptions, photos and search terms. In the outside world of “made-up reality” they emerge as quotes from film and TV productions. Turning the focus onto film props reveals an eccentric history of German film, tracing their appearances in such movies as Kolberg, Großstadtrevier, Welt am Draht, Prüfstand 7, Finsterworld or Sonnenallee, but also in the daily soap opera Verbotene Liebe. In docu-fiction, the props lead BiPOC actor and activist Thelma Buabeng into postcolonial provenance research in the props house and a daily thing-life of African objects.
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.
Truck driver Abu Husain spends endless hours in Qatar in a self-contained world of standing, waiting, and tenaciously moving trucks on the fringes of society.
Truck driver Abu Husain, like many guest workers in Qatar, spends endless hours in a self-contained world of standing, waiting, and tenaciously moving trucks on the fringes of society.
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.
A summer Sunday at a motorway service area. The trucks stand still. The drivers doze, cook, stare into space. A phone call with the family provides inner and outer movement.
Can you imagine that the cows look different in Germany? A summer day at a rest area of the German Autobahn. The trucks line up. Everything stands still. Nothing moves. Behind the windshield. Under the tarpaulin. Between the trucks. A temporary home. They are waiting. Next to it nature.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.