There’s no time like the present, would be a good description of a phenomenon Paula Oneţ came across in the region of Cluj in Romania, which made her curious. Women and men in the second half of their lives but still quite hale and hearty are intensely concerned about the photo that’s to be mounted on their own headstone – not as a hypothetical issue, but as a very concrete undertaking.
Visits to the hairdresser are made, photo shootings scheduled, serious discussions had over headstones which, though the owner is still very much alive, are already standing on the graves, decorated with flowers and wreathes. The headstone, including a carefully produced and selected portrait, is a status symbol during one’s lifetime. And it’s the – evidently – vain attempt to determine how you want to be remembered by posterity. But what may seem an eccentric and possibly bothersome task at first glance actually shows a healthy, fear-free attitude to one’s own death.
“As You Like It” is an entertaining reflection about our earthly existence and the human need to understand one’s inevitable demise as a part of life.

Lina Dinkla

In the small town of Lunguleţu in Southern Romania there are around 1,000 farmers who own the same number of tractors and produce 100,000 tons of cabbage and potatoes per year. Every one of these thousand farmers will then stand on the local market square in summer after the potato harvest and in late autumn after the cabbage harvest, sacks of cabbage and potatoes piled up in huge pyramids as far as the eye can see. Any attempt to make a profit by selling the produce is, of course, in vain in view of this absurd overproduction. The diligent farmers underbid each other until they end up either losing money or ploughing the harvest under right away.

When director Şerban Georgescu buys a ton of white cabbage for his mother for 20 Euros here, he begins to wonder and decides to spend a year in Lunguleţu and cultivate cabbage and potatoes himself. He investigates why the farmers voluntarily enter this economic dead end. Even though the mayor and a few villagers have some good ideas for finding a way out of this misery, a common solution is not in sight. The suspicion among them sits deep and the fear of any kind of cooperative is great – the memories of expropriation under Ceauşescu are still too fresh, potential success by competition seems too tempting, even if they are threatened by bankruptcy every day.

Lina Dinkla

Today we see them with a tourist’s eye – or we don’t see them at all, like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin. “Palace for the People” visits five emblematic buildings of the socialist era: massive stone bodies, whose facades and interiors, configuration of rooms and furniture, decor and functionality invariably aimed for the representation of political systems and values. Superlative power buildings – some shooting up high like the Lomonosov University in Moscow, some sprawling like Ceauşescu’s palace in Bucharest.

Guided tours are always a form of return, a kind of retrospective, the affective connection to what is gone. With a sharp eye for historic architectural quirks and characteristic features, Georgi Bogdanov and Boris Missirkov take us to places that are, however historical they may seem, still haunted by the ghosts of the visions they were once built for. Places soaked with futures that never materialised or materialised quite differently from what was envisioned.

Lukas Stern

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Nominated for the Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize and the MDR Film Prize


The screening on 31 October, 17:00, is a special screening supported by MDR.

Never heard of Stremt? But you can learn how to stage a revolution from the small Romanian village near Cluj-Napoca in the Carpathian Mountains. It doesn’t take carnations or the colour orange but, first of all, alcohol for Dutch courage. Only then do you set out, arm yourself and suddenly identify enemies and terrorists everywhere – or was it the other way round? Time passes more slowly in Stremt. After they saw Ceauşescu’s fall on television, some villagers felt that their hour had come and decided to rebel. But where do you start a revolt when everyone knows everyone else? The ensuing dramatic scenes were mainly due to the wild conjecture and rumours that spread suddenly – and the fact that no one was hurt was mainly due to the fact that the pistol wasn’t loaded. The two young filmmakers’, born in 1985 and 1989, short film is a merry tour de force that demonstrates how quickly a house of card collapses once fear has been conquered.
– Cornelia Klauß

Her son’s daily phone call and taking regular baths are among an elderly woman’s favourite pastimes. She finds lightness by immersing herself in the water. The memories weighing her down disappear. Will she resurface to answer her son’s phone call? A creative short film full of powerful images that dives into the spheres of different animation techniques – and of existence. A poetic stream of thoughts about transience.

Annina Wettstein