A playful and highly informative attempt to describe the anarchic variety of creatures who regularly meet at camps and international conventions under the umbrella of Europe’s biggest hacker association, the Chaos Computer Club. Sandra Trostel looks over the shoulders of nerds, political activists, makers and “other galactic life forms” and shows, complemented by short animated sequences, what it means to regard society not as a given fact but as malleable material there to be “hacked”. Renouncing glorification but revealing a well-developed sense for inner contradictions, the film portrays a (sub)culture whose concerns have long become mainstream.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Nominated for the Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize

When Karen Winther comes across a few old boxes during a move she finds herself confronted with her past. On top are some swastika stickers, next to a tape labelled “Blitz” and “Hits”, and a lot of stuff decorated with the imperial eagle. Twenty years ago she joined a right-wing extremist organisation in Norway, looking for adventure and like-minded people. “It’s embarrassing to look at,” she comments in the voice over.

“Exit” is her film, her story, and yet the plot soon points in other directions, refuses to be constrained by its own structure. Winther travels to the US to meet women who also used to move in right-wing extremist circles. She sits in the car with a former left-wing extremist activist, talking about a formative encounter many years ago. She meets Ingo Hasselbach, “The Führer of Berlin”, whose career in the East German neo-Nazi scene is the subject of Winfried Bonengel’s film “Führer Ex”. And she meets a former jihadist who served a sentence in a Paris prison. In addition to surprisingly similar motivations and experiences, what they all have in common are the difficulties caused by their “Exits” – feelings of guilt, but also threats from still active members.

Carolin Weidner

---

Awarded with the Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, the Young Eyes Film Award and the Gedanken-Aufschluss Prize from the Jury of juvenile and yound adult prisoners of JSA Regis-Breitingen

“The White Stripe” was the name of an art project in which five GDR citizens from the Weimar punk and underground scene who had left the GDR in 1986 wanted to paint a line around the Western side of the Berlin wall. On the second day, GDR border guards ambushed them and one of the friends ended up in Bautzen prison. Only after years in the West did they find out that in the GDR one of them had reported their activities – and about his brother.
Gerd Kroske plumbs the depths of betrayal, suppression and forgiveness in interviews with the protagonists, including a brash (and not unsympathetic) border guard, supported by a wealth of archive material with the scratchy, anarchic charm of Super 8 and ORWO. He insists without discrediting. The deeper he delves into the past, the more it recedes in favour of the question how both sides continued to live with the betrayal. The topicality of this story emerges in the great final showdown between the brothers as well as in the recurring images of the wall between Israel and Palestine. It’s not that easy to paint lines even today. Especially if it’s the line you want to draw under something.
Grit Lemke

“After all, these are not good memories, fun memories. And really, that time is buried.” Between 30 April and 4 May 1945, several hundred civilians commited mass suicide in the Pomeranian town of Demmin. There was desperation between the ideological void and the fear of the Red Army. Whole families drowned, hanged or poisoned themselves. The nervousness of the old citizens of Demmin whom Martin Farkas visits is still noticeable: not a hand that stays motionless during the interview – they are rubbed against skirts or twitch all over the place. One inhabitant describes the perfection of the city before the war and the “tinkering” that began after it was over and is still going on today. “Tinkering” is not a bad term for what is going on in Demmin and what Farkas is looking to illustrate in his film. There are the right wing extremists who abuse the consequences of that mass hysteria as an occasion for an annual funeral march on 8 May, the anniversary of the German surrender. There are the citizens of Demmin who turn away, part disgusted, part indifferent. There are counter-rallies and a few mostly contemporary witnesses, who open up about their memories for the first time after 70 years.

Carolin Weidner

North Korea wants to be the best of all possible worlds. Everything and everyone is taken care off. Pyongyang is a clean, modern metropolis. 8-year-old Zin-mi, who is at the centre of this film, takes us through the stations of a happy childhood: becoming a member of the pioneer organisation, brisk flag ceremonies, enough food and always a song in praise of the Great Leader Kim Jong-un on her lips.

Russian-Ukrainian director Vitaly Mansky got the official permission to document the ordinary life of the city and country for one year. He knows that he is being instrumentalised and simply turns the tables by exposing how the presentations and arrangements are fabricated. His official minder proves to be a real “co-director”. So it’s the apparent details and minor matters Mansky asks us to discover. They offer insights into a well-trained and dulled society. Though we feel like we’re in “1984”, Mansky has come neither as a voyeur nor as a cynic. His camera is looking for the human element behind the mask of the official bulletins: a yawn or a moment of insecurity in this land of the ever-rising sun.

Cornelia Klauß

A “culture of welcome” could become the new euphemistic non-word of the year. It pervades this film which observes over an extended period of time what happens when two well-to-do Northern German villages are supposed to welcome a group of asylum seekers.
There are the citizens in their terrace houses who can’t let their daughters out into the streets if the end of the world as represented by 53 refugees (black if worst comes to worst) is near. They hastily form citizens’ initiatives to take legal action against this impending doom. There is the pub owner who in an apparently selfless gesture offers his empty guestrooms, which is presented as the “socially acceptable” option. There are the administrators who are desperately looking for housing, struggling for acceptance, at last set up a few containers and then give themselves a satisfied pat on the back. All of them can’t emphasize enough how welcome the foreigners are to them in principle (but not too many, not in our town). And there are the foreigners themselves, traumatised at the end of an odyssey and hoping for a new home.
Wendler and Rau show an everyday racism that does not come in combat boots but in the guise of charity and democracy – but also people who spend the night with a refugee’s children when the mother has to go to hospital. And at the end the pub owner frying up a schnitzel with the Albanians – in the heart of the German province.
Grit Lemke