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 ghostly search for traces, based on the 1965 U.S. embargo against “communist” real hair wigs from Asia. Is every wig inhabited by a ghost from the imperial past?
This film is about the haunting memories of Asia’s late-20th-century modernisation. The story departs from a 1965 United States embargo on the hair trade, known as the “Communist Hair Ban”. In every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.
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.
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?
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.
“Every family has its own set of circumstances and problems that only its members can fully understand.” Daisaku Ikeda
A quiet Sunday afternoon in the aristocratic family home, just before the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Andras and his daughter Zsofia are caught by surprise when Andras’ brother, Zoltan, intrudes into the intimacy of their home, along with his big family. A poetic, dark, and somewhat humorous social observation, in which family ties and relationships are broken down and dissected into pieces.
As Austro-Hungary teeters on collapse, Andras and his daughter are taken aback by the visit from Andras' unpredictable brother, Zoltan, who comes accompanied by his large family.
In southern California, date palms from the Middle East grow, tales from One Thousand and One Nights are told and a volcanic eruption is expected. A document of enchanting simultaneity.
Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from the Middle East flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining colour 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley, Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensory, polyvocal evocation of place.
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.
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.
How do you restitute self-images? A lucid, thought-provoking essay about the Congo, the far-reaching dimensions of colonial power and the (re-)privatisation of identity.
The film Lumène is based on in-depth research into photographic archives taken in the heart of the Belgian Congo between 1938 and 1939 by the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber. These archives are kept at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.
In this first part, Lumène: Privatisation, director David Shongo, in collaboration with the traditional chiefs of Lusanga, Mukedi and Feshi, analyses how photography was used as a tool of colonial domination and how it contributed to a process of privatisation of the imaginary, images, cultural heritage and spaces. These analyses raise current issues such as restitution, reparation and the domination of knowledge.
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.
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.
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.