They came to Germany to free the country from racism and oppression. But their own army and country were ruled by strict segregation. This documentary by Dag Freyer tells the story of the African-American soldiers stationed in post-World War Two Germany. Accepted by the German population as representatives of one of the victorious powers, it was the first time they experienced a kind of equality. They were allowed to enter the same places as white people, relationships with white women – unthinkable at home – were the order of the day.
The shock after their return from the war was all the bigger. Once back in the States, the black US military personnel found they were facing the same conditions as before the war: segregation and discrimination determined their lives. In Germany the soldiers had seen the opposite and this experience of freedom was to give a massive boost to the civil rights movement. An irony of history: one of the foundation stones for the victory over segregation in the United States was laid in the ruins of Nazi Germany, of all places.
In “A Touch of Freedom”, World War Two veterans remember their time in Germany and their political work at home. Among them is former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, talking about his deployment in Gelnhausen in one of his most personal interviews.

From the first sequence this film takes us right into Gerhard Richter’s well-protected Cologne studio. The filmmaker Corinna Belz observed the media-shy artist at work over the summer of 2009, in the bright rooms where he paints, regards, evaluates, thinks, waits, discards, re-works, sometimes destroys and begins again.
In extremely condensed scenes Richter shares a very personal and highly charged creative process with us, from the first layer of paint via countless re-workings and repaintings to the last, decisive stage when the painting must stand on its own and stand up to the artist’s critical eye. We are drawn into the process by Richter’s dry comments which reveal not just hard-won wisdom about life and art but also a laconic sense of humour, a deep humanity and the ability to question himself as much as the events before and behind the camera.
He still has his fundamental scepticism of all ideologies and religious systems. “I want to know what’s going on,” was a reason for painting he once gave. Richter’s aim is to find ever new perspectives, examine the image of the world which in the end shines through in every single painting. “Painting is another form of thinking”, Richter said early in his career. This film takes his premise seriously.

Production note

Kuba is 13 years old, his brother Mikołaj is seven. Kuba wakes his brother up, asks him to eat breakfast, the boy refuses. They go out to together to buy some crisps and walk home hand in hand. At night they sit at home and play computer games. There’s something missing in this daily routine: where are the adults?
Kuba’s and Mikołaj’s parents are not in the same country as their sons. Their father works in Scotland, their mother in Austria, while the sons are waiting in Poland for one of them to come home. At school Kuba is not allowed to tell that the two boys are alone, and the construction seems indeed to be tottering only when Kuba reaches his limits and behaves conspicuously.
The film is a disconcerting demonstration of how responsibilities have shifted with the labour markets and how economic problems can lead to passive violence against the weakest members of our society.

The border between Poland and Germany fell in 2004. At first the Poles feared that their rich neighbours would buy up their land and property. Ten years later things look different: a new movement has started in the almost abandoned villages of the provincial East German border regions that turns all familiar stereotypes of the binational relationship upside down. The drop in real estate prices made a region that until recently attracted attention only because it was depopulated, as the young people, who had no perspective, moved away, attractive to Polish families from the wider Szczecin area. One after the other they move “across”. They earn enough money to afford houses here and at the same time live near their workplaces.
The Poles are conquering the lonely expanse of their West. The only working mobile phone network is Polish, the real estate companies are firmly under Polish control, there’s an association that helps them deal with the German authorities and the local building society is advertising German child benefits. The new arrivals learn German and send their children to the European School. A whimsical sociological study about cheap real estate, typical Poles, typical Germans, the other and the new Europe.

This documentary reconstructs the history of right-wing terrorism in Europe, which started over 40 years ago.
Italian neo-fascists were the first to execute murderous attacks in order to prevent a political shift to the left and enforce the return to an authoritarian regime in the young Republic. Old and new Nazis in the Federal Republic of Germany studied the methods of left-wing terrorism to profit from them. The RAF’s spectacular acts of violence drew all public attention to themselves, a circumstance exploited by right-wing terrorists to target the young democracy almost unnoticed. In France and Belgium, too, neo-Nazis organised themselves and formed combat organisations against parliamentary democracy. Their paramilitary groups were in close contact with their counterparts in the Federal Republic and Italy.
When a number of neo-Nazi organisations were banned in Germany in the mid-1990s, the extreme right responded with a new strategy. They disbanded fixed structures and formed loose comradeships which would allow them to act spontaneously and avoid prosecution. Since the main focus of the security authorities’ attention currently is on Islamist terrorism, there is a great danger that right-wing terrorists will be able to massively upgrade their arsenals and refine their conspiratorial underground structures.

Production note