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 most profound memories are sometimes the most deceptive. That’s what Brett Allen Smith finds out as he keeps replaying the funeral of the family dogs. A baffling confrontation.
Recasting his newborn son and dog as himself and his childhood pets, a filmmaker confronts his own false memories through a collage of film, digital and video game footage.
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.
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 young woman breaks up an ugly plywood wardrobe that reminds her of an act of violence in her past. An artefact of pain is destroyed – a powerful gesture.
Attempting to purge a bad memory, Joana decides to return to the place where she suffered an act of violence in 2013 to free herself of the last trigger that binds her to this incident from the past – a wardrobe. In this self-portrait, the director appropriates the essayist traits of the documentary as a process to deal with inner ghosts. Through a ritual established by a recollection of facts, she confronts her own expectations facing the charges she endures as a woman.
Deserters is a film about a generation of Bosnian youth from the city of Mostar swept by the devastating war at the brink of their maturity and the tough decision to escape from it.
Deserters is a film about a generation of Bosnian youth from the city of Mostar swept by the devastating war at the brink of their maturity and the tough decision to escape from it. Their exile stories from the 90s, contained in letters mailed to the director of this film from refugee camps scattered across Europe, are confronted with the present condition of the city they were forced to leave. A film about a missing generation, exile, hard choices, and the answer to the most difficult question of any war: to stay or to run?
Fanni, a rejected trans, seeks refuge in Laci’s hut. The solitary homeless man becomes a father figure to her and together, they confront her inner demons and the harsh rejection by society.
On the outskirts of Budapest, in the heart of the woods, hides a ramshackle little hut. Inside, two social outcasts have formed the unlikeliest of bonds. Fanni, a 19-year-old transgender teenager, and Laci, a 60-year-old homeless man support each other in a makeshift family as father and daughter through hardship and change. Set on the margins of Hungarian society, life is tough but it is theirs. Let your conventions be challenged in this coming-of-age documentary about home, family and acceptance.
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?
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.
Ka.tzetnik lived a life of secrecy, becoming a myth. Rumours suggested that he wrote all night, donning his Auschwitz uniform and that he never left his house despite his books selling millions.
The film explores the writer's personal odyssey in coping with his trauma through the unconventional path of LSD.
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”.
Lockdown, easing, lockdown: Vienna in the Covid-19 pandemic from March 2020 to December 2021. Generous tableaus document paralysis, fear, learning, anger – and incipient repression.
The Standstill shows Vienna and its surroundings along with encounters with people during and after the Covid-19 crisis. The film tells of the immediate and the long-term effects, which can only be evaluated and classified in the future.
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?
When the West was still wild there was room there for gay love stories that are missing in today’s history books. A queer rewriting of U.S. pioneer tales.
At the dawn of the American West, two men – one a little-known Creole, the other a closeted historical icon – entered into a volatile relationship that spanned a continent. The Wages of John Pernia is their story: a gay Western romance that emerges from between the lines of official history.
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.