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.
In front of a psychiatric clinic a patient enjoys his tenth coffee in the morning. Two street musicians take a break. Three boule players are waiting for their next turn. And a couple of teenagers celebrate the eve of the summer of their lives.
Ten chance encounters on Berlin benches, a brief pause in the everyday life of a restless city. What moves the lingerers? Where do they come from and where are they going? A homage to public seating and the people who use it.
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 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.
An outcry, a free-roaming paper dog and enduring pain: This experimental stop motion animation takes us into the emotional depths of a personal story of loss.
The experimental stop-motion animation Brother is a celebration of life.
Dedicated to all those who are in danger of being forgotten.
It is also a reminder to live in the moment because you never know what will happen. But of course, it is not easy to let go and remember, because grief knows no day and night and makes no exception, whether you are rich or poor. A universal feeling that affects every person in this world. The animation does not want to explain or provide a plan on how to deal with grief. It is a snapshot, born during the pandemic, when every day felt the same and the shadows of the past had an easy time intervening and dominating the daily routine.
The film was made during the project module Animated Words in the MFA studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar // Media Arts studies.
Mentors: Catalina Giraldo Vélez and Ana Maria Vallejo
Directors Note: The most personal story I have to deal with. A part of me that I was able to wrap up in a film. A need to move on and not let myself be constantly overwhelmed by sadness. I banished my memories into animation and now I watch the film whenever I want to remember...
Clowning around with a red nose? No way! Clown*esses challenge the patriarchal society with anarchy and subversion and cultivate the fun of creative resistance.
The clown*esses Gözde and Lokke emancipate themselves from patriarchal structures and representations in search of their very own homeland. Between the stage and everyday life, they find their constant in transformation and enter into a dialogue with themselves and the world. An underestimated theatrical art becomes a niche of feminism. A documentary between reality and magic.
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.
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.
Despite the lack of infrastructure, Mamy, from Guinea, builds up the first coffee washing station in all of West Africa and, through his vision, gives local people back their pride.
“I have seen many of my family members fail when trying. (...) I want to try too, but differently!”
Mamy Dioubaté is the founder of Macenta Beans and a visionary. He has been building West Africa's first coffee washing station for three years. In the rainforest of Guinea, not far from the Liberian border, the coffee is processed to high quality and thus saved from exploitative middlemen.
Mamy doesn't eat, he sleeps a maximum of 4 hours a day, pulls his own tooth and gets malaria 3 times in one season. Why does he do this?
At first glance, Macenta lacks roads, electricity and water supply, but if you ask Mamy, it is trust and hope that is missing. Hardly anyone here believes in a self-determined future – but he does. In First Taste, we see Mamy in his life's work to change the entire agricultural system of a country. He visits 131 villages in Macenta and hands each farmer his coffee. For the first time, the local people are transformed from producers to consumers. We experience surprise. Disappointment. Pleasure. Disgust. Shame. And above all pride. Mamy puts all his eggs in one basket – especially his own hope. What would it mean for him if he fails with this vision?
This desktop video essay examines how the media illustrate the issue of abortion. Clicking through photo databases and magazines reveals the consequences of suggestive images.
What do abortions look like? What kind of images shape our view on them? And where do these images come from? The desktop video essay getty abortions examines how German and Austrian media illustrate the topic of abortion, browsing through stock photo databases, teen magazines and personal documents of a real abortion experience. It jumps from the early 2000s to the late 19th century, seeks out feminist knowledge and chats with fictional characters. But one question remains: Why does no one look into the camera?
A Grave on the Border is an intimate account of war and flight by Syrian refugee Rose Alkhaled. Filmed in a small town in Germany, this atmospheric short immerses the viewer in the world of Rose's memories that surface at night. Rose tells her story through emotive sculptures made out of newspaper and performances of her poetry. Quiet night-time scenes are forcefully disrupted by Rose's nightmares as they burst to the surface of her mind. The film is underscored by a compelling clarinet composition. While Rose's story is deeply personal, this film also tells the story of millions of women who were forced to flee their homeland.
Director Maren Hahnfeld's films North of Eden and Winter in Eden were screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, editor Alex Barratt's feature London Symphony was nominated for Best British Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and All the Colours of the World by composers Shrubshall and Kett was screened at the 2023 Berlinale.
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.
Lamine and his family recently moved to a farm in Senegal. There’s always a lot to do, but the afternoons are too hot. So it’s off to the beach with his new friend.
Lamine is seven years old and has just moved to Senegal with his family. His dad is half-Senegalese but was born and raised in Germany. The family of five has given up everything in Germany and is planning their future in West Africa. With their savings, they have bought a piece of land in the savannah where they want to build their own eco-farm. This has been their dream for years. The project is called “Gorgorlou” and means “life artist” in the local language Wolof. Their goal is to grow fruit and vegetables without soil in a sustainable and climate-friendly way and to keep animals in a species-appropriate way. Everything that forms nutrients is used. But there is still a lot to do before it all goes right: a huge greenhouse, a large chicken garden with space for 2,000 chickens, fish ponds and a small residential house, which they want to move into quickly because the farm has to be guarded day and night and because it is so nice to live in the middle of nature.
Lamine wants to learn everything from the beginning to become a real eco-farmer later on. He thinks it's great that he has so much freedom here. In the evening, he meets his new friend Samba on the beach for a mango picnic and finds out that mangoes are pretty much the best thing in Senegal!
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.