"1/2" is an animated short film about one question: How do you get up if you have lost everything that is worth living for?

Real excitement is always kind of out of focus. Unfortunately. All joy lies buried in a blind rush and hasty perceptions. That's why I never got my eyes lasered.

A poetic snapshot of the life of a couple who just live side by side and have ceased to pay attention to each other. An unexpected incident disturbs their routine and brings the couple closer again.

An electrical banana, a mammoth in the garden, a singing mushroom and the “synthe-sigher” – or avant-garde, cult and underground, all these terms can be applied to this total work of art from Karl-Marx-Stadt. Founded in 1998, the band quickly became an insider’s tip in the relevant clubs of the GDR and managed not to be swallowed by the system until their abrupt end in 1993. Music with electronic elements, dadaist lyrics, monotonous sprechgesang, cryptic or deliberately silly costumes and masks on stage, and the use of painting and film – multimedia before the term was invented – were the hallmarks of AG Geige’s style. Their consistent rejection of sense and worship of the absurd were not just expressions of a whole generation’s attitude to life, but a subversive strategy in a country where even the most banal utterances were seen as political statements.
Carsten Gebhardt, a native of Chemnitz, raises a monument to the band by interviewing its members and reanimating the specific AG Geige aesthetics in collages of music and Super 8 films. Big names like Ronald Galenza, Christoph Tannert and Lutz Schramm describe the concept of a superficial “dilettantism” concealing “professional work and a lived quirkiness”. In that sense, Gebhardt’s film is a worthy amateur film.
The subversive seed flowered, by the way. The sons of two members of the band founded Kraftclub, a contemporary cult band.

Grit Lemke

Two girls find a machine that makes them older so they can go to the movies and the disco.

This sweeping visual investigation was prompted by the question, “After many years of hatred and extreme violence in our family, can my four siblings and I manage to forge sound relationships with other people, even though our parents and their parents before them were unable to?”
Birnur Pilavci deftly manoeuvres between the cliffs of contradictory certainties in her film. On the one hand there is the burden of the family we are born into and whose weight we are forced to carry, on the other hand there is the freedom to make decisions for oneself (or others), not resigned to fate but following one’s own inner compass. Or, as the great German journalist and exiled writer Willy Haas put it: “There are people who do wrong because they were wronged (like everybody). And there are those who do not do wrong, precisely because they were wronged.” The longer you watch it, the more it seems as if “Dancing Alone” wasn’t planned at all but more or less happened to all those involved – an open-ended experiment. “I doubt whether this is a good thing”, says the director, “but I guess it had to happen.”


– Ralph Eue

“I am an old tidal outlet at whose end a village is situated. My story was ground to dust by water and sand.” Can a tidal outlet – a canal connecting the North Sea and the harbour – speak? This question caused quite a stir in 1962 and led some people to reject this film, in which a landscape and its inhabitants are not described from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, but from that of a tidal outlet. Pictures of a deserted beach, a drive through the village, decaying walls, portraits of people. Pure poetry. “I am as tired as the tarred houses.”
– Grit Lemke

Lola is on the withdrawal of love. To find a substitute satisfaction she cuts the throat of her bird, puts the bloodied body into the freezer and abuses the vacuum cleaner sexually .

Wasn’t there anything worth mentioning? No, not for Oliver Tatarus’ father. What should he talk about with his son in front of the camera? But the director doesn’t give up. As a child he didn’t live in Germany but in Bucharest, Romania. As a child he saw no reason to leave. But his parents saw no future in Ceauşescu’s Romania. And one day the decision had been taken. A leave-taking began that was to last two years. An agonising break-up that never quite turned into a departure and gradually isolated the members of the family from each other. At some point half the flat was cleared: sold. And he says there wasn’t anything?
The son wants to know why he was denied a future in his home country. He confronts his parents, questions them separately. His reaction when they refuse to contribute to this recycling of feelings is as sullen as a child’s. In the middle of the interview his mother loses her composure because her son apparently still refuses to understand what the reality in Bucharest was like then: “like Hiroshima.”
Tataru returns to his hometown to compare memories. He finds poetic images of desertion, the grey tones of the Bucharest facades that he once thought of as velvety, gaps in the walls as wide as the memory gap running through his family. But the cement is already there in the subjective images. Old wounds and fears come together to form the picture of a family, a puzzle of tensions and emotions.
– Lars Meyer

Mirela, a woman in her mid-30s, is standing in a street in the megacity of Mumbai and cursing. Once again the German has booked a car and driver for some business appointments. Once again the car has given out and the driver speaks practically no English. Jake, a US-American, is trying to comprehend the Tokyo public transport system and has squeezed himself and his backpack into one of the crowded subway cars. The student Hye-Won lives in Munich with her husband and little son. The South-Korean dreams of mobility. All three protagonists decide to get a driving license to be able to move freely in their adopted countries.
The filmmakers observe their driving lessons and show everyday scenes in which cultural differences emerge most clearly. Some of the situations with the driving instructors are hilarious, but we also see their desperation and the feeling of being strangers far from home. We may live in a globalised world, but this film demonstrates how deeply we are all marked by our culture and how hard it is to shed it. Preparing for a driving test in a foreign culture seems to be no less difficult than learning a foreign language. No doubt about it, globalisation has not spread to driving a car.
– Antje Stamer

In this music video for the band Crepes Sucette, 12 animals are chasing each other through the 12 minor keys of the circle of fifths. The special thing about this funny hunt: every single piece of the setting is made out of wool.

The world trusts German cars; “Made in Germany” is regarded as a guarantee of solid craftsmanship. This has a lot to do with Germany’s unique system of apprentice training, which is based on centuries of tradition. But what’s it like to be an apprentice today, especially at one of the flagships of the German car industry?
Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken portray six 16- to 19-year-olds who started their apprenticeship as industrial mechanics at the Bochum Opel works in 2009, and their instructor. They are there when the boys pull on their Opel shirts for the first time, sweat at the drill and lathe, measure a piece for the hundredth time and despair when they fail once more to satisfy Mr. Kranz’s standards; when they boredly play with their mobile phones during boring union meetings and suddenly loose all coolness before a test. It’s still true that everyone has to start at the bottom of the ladder, but something is different: Loeken/Franke confront the images of the boys’ working life – filmed exclusively at the workplace – with news reports of imminent job cuts at Opel. Iron principles and pre-shaped identities – I am an “Opelaner” and Opel is part of Ruhr destrict like the Schalke football club – are destabilised by the ups and downs of the stock market. In this phase of transition from school and home to working life, each apprentice develops his own strategy to deal with that insecurity. Because everything could be over before it even started. Opel recently announced that intend to give up Bochum as a location in 2016 was announced.
– Grit Lemke

The life of children in the Bernese Uplands in essays and simple observations composed and read by them. This film was made in only four days in collaboration with the children and their teacher (“Our teacher is a beautiful lady.”). Going to school in the snow, the classroom with its stove in which a child lights the fire, writing on slates, scrubbed school desks, the children’s drawings. This view of the mountain farmers’ hard life only appears to be naive: in its concentration on essentials, details which may only be visible to a child’s eye, reality seems almost magically transported.
– Grit Lemke

Sorrow is not part of my mind – it's part of my head.

An American who after ten years still feels like a stranger in Germany wants to learn more about the Germans. Where would these people be more themselves than at the “Stammtisch”, the regulars’ table? And didn’t Tacitus already describe the Teutons’ drinking habits? So the stranger embarks on a journey to Beerland.
This framework is based on the American cultural anthropologists’ tried and proven concept of thick description: “reading” a culture like a text via a phenomenon or ritual. The self-made anthropologist Matt Sweetwood follows the concept in an experiment on himself as a kind of Michael Moore of applied beer research. This takes him from the Oktoberfest on mysterious “beer paths” to a Berlin corner pub and the Cologne Carnival, to the spectacle of a beer war, into a private brewery, to the coronation of a beer queen and at last even to a shooting club. He merrily travels the length and breadth of the Republic, German history and film genres from road movie to comedy, report and even animation. He encounters plenty of tradition, absurdity and mummery, occasionally even the proverbial ugly, stupid, roaring German full of xenophobia. But most of them are likeable fellows who will gladly explain the only true way of touching glasses to a stranger. A persistent folk culture and indeed something like a German identity emerge. Yes, there’s truth even in beer.
– Grit Lemke

Pinguins do not have any belly button ... do they? A young pinguin goes on a trip through definitions, letters, symboles and images ... On this way it tries to get to know itself.