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.
A journey through places and times that shaped the life of Turkish writer and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan. She writes against silence, especially in exile.
Shattered photos, excerpts from newspapers and pieces of words become voices that spread through the alleys of a city until they reach the house of a writer, who’s writing a page. These fragmented voices tell the story of Aslı Erdogan, a Turkish author forced to live in exile in Europe after being imprisoned for her political ideas.
The voices narrate her life, from her childhood in Istanbul and her feminist commitment to the years as a researcher in Switzerland, the fugue to Brazil before returning to Istanbul, the heart of her lost country. Footage of travel and migration in search of work, images from physics laboratories, videos of protests against the authorities in Istanbul: these materials get mixed in a visual and sound flow becoming the essence of our collective memory, shared by every discriminated person, among them Aslı Erdogan during her exile. Meanwhile, the process of writing has erupted: the page contains words.
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.
Danielle's raw-filmed diary and Moe's vibrant queer memory of living with a sexually transmitted infection, ignite a collaborative exploration of bodies, intimacy, and shame.
A Beirut rooftop conversation about living with sexually transmitted infections opens into a cinematic dialogue, as Danielle and Moe draw raw and vibrant images from their personal experiences. Danielle filmed herself in sober and melancholic images to grasp what is going on, while Moe plays with memories and sensations of a queer body “invaded” by a virus.
While they engage with five actresses and actors to embody the testimonies of individuals who also lived with STIs, “forbidden” stories begin to exist and enter a collaborative exploration of intimacy, bodies, stigma and shame.
Els is in her late forties, divorced and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, that she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible.
Falling is a lyrical, found-footage-based testimony from a mother who faces not only the taboos surrounding motherhood but also the most difficult situation in her life.
For years, Michelle has been trying to prove her imprisoned husband’s innocence. A documentary thriller about a tireless struggle against the U.S. American justice system.
When Michelle married her long-time friend Jermaine on the bleak visiting floor of a maximum-security prison, she hoped they would soon share a life in freedom. Jermaine claims to be wrongfully convicted. He is serving a sentence of 22 years to life at the notorious Sing Sing prison near New York City. For years, Michelle has fought tirelessly to prove his innocence while also caring for her teenage children, Paul and Kaylea, as a single mother. In a gruelling routine of short phone calls, letter-writing and brief visits to the correctional facility, she dreams of an idyllic family life outside of the prison walls. As Paul and Kaylea are about to start their own lives, Michelle's quest becomes increasingly urgent. Then, a new piece of evidence is discovered in Jermaine's legal case, raising her hopes for his immediate release. Almost a decade in the making, For the Time Being is an intimate exploration of female resilience and a timely look at the far-reaching consequences of the ailing U.S. justice system.
Gedanken-Aufschluss Prize, DOK Leipzig, Germany (2023)
DOK Film Market Exclusives
The Forgotten Roundup
Fabio Lucchini
In 1943, Hitler ordered the destruction of Marseilles' oldest neighbourhood. Today, the last survivours fight to have this tragedy recognised as a crime against humanity.
The film follows the last survivors of this tragedy, as they deliver a last attempt to break the silence around these forgotten Nazi crimes. Through their direct accounts, the film also recounts the terrible days of the round-up, when France's oldest neighbourhood was raised to the ground and the life of hundreds of families, most of them first or second-generation migrants, was destroyed forever.
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?
5 Moroccan boys live in a cave at the lighthouse in Melilla and dream of Europe. Away from their mothers, longing for one ship that will transfer them illegally to a better life.
The Moroccan boys Imad (15), Nourdine (17), Walid (18), Hamza (17) and Aziz (20) live in a cave under the lighthouse in Melilla. Every night they break into the harbour trying to climb onto the ships leaving for the Spanish mainland. In the shadow of the rocks, they and a hundred other kids have created their own micro-society: “Lord of the Flies” in reality – with their own hierarchies, chants and rules. To pass the time, they phone their mothers on video or film themselves being chased by the police. The film follows the gang of boys for 5 years. From their life in the caves to their successful escape attempts to Spain. They call themselves: Harragas – those who burn the passports, the borders, their lives.
Old Super 8 films show domestic happiness, the West German economic miracle, an idyllic home, grandmother Rose as a young woman at the centre. They do not show the violence in Rose’s marriage. Or do they?
Home Sweet Home is a film about the invisibility of domestic violence. It is the story of the director's grandmother, Rose, who, for over 20 years, was married to a man who repeatedly abused her until she finally left him. Based on Super8 family archive, the director questions Rose, who continually dismantles the image of postwar West German family happiness. The film focuses on the discrepancy between appearance and remembered reality.
As domestic violence is usually not visible, the private abyss is skilfully hidden in public.
Driven by three larger-than-life heroines, Homelessly in Love challenges conceptions of motherhood, womanhood and trauma on the margins of contemporary American society. Alyssa, Michelle, Lorraine and Cynthia, a homeless singer-songwriter whose voice envelops the film, have all suffered from institutional, intimate or domestic abuse. Over the course of four years, they overcome their past and harness the filmmaking process to elaborate their own star-making narratives.
As a dancer coming from an immigrant family, Çağdaş often feels more like a performer around them than on the stage. When he decides to contact his estranged father in Turkey, the boundary between real and performed begins to blur as his story is woven into the production of a new piece by internationally renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. How much does the absence of his father and the traumatic silence that has filled the void contribute to him feeling like an outsider in the only place he's ever called home? In Four Movements weaves dance and documentary through an intimate journey of self-discovery as Çağdaş faces his past, his performance, and his desire for belonging.
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.
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.
Two best friends are drifting through the city of Montreal. They come from a small Inuit settlement in northern Canada and share the same heritage, language and longings.
Kathy and Teresa are best friends. Far from their home village, a small Inuit settlement in northern Canada, the two young women share a tender relationship in the city of Montreal.
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.