The Russian long-term observation “Born in the USSR” is known worldwide for having followed the chequered lives of nine children born in the Soviet era for 28 years. Emmy award winner Sergey Miroshnichenko creates fascinating insights into the worlds of his protagonists who have now grown up in quite a different value system. Take nine ordinary seven-year-olds and change their whole environment. Put their parents’ values upside down and exchange them for the norms and values of the society they will grow up in. Add puberty and hormones at the age of 14, followed by military service, financial difficulties and the onset of adult responsibilities at 21. Then wait seven years. “Born in the USSR” portrays very different people from Russia, Central Asia, the Baltic States and the Caucasus. It’s more than a film about life in the post-Soviet era, more even than a collection of biographies. It is always a very universal film about growing up, about dreams and hopes, realities and disappointments and the big question of what life holds in store for each of us.

Production note

He is the most important man in Russia, a two-time President and two-time Minister President of the biggest country on earth who became President of the Russian Federation again in May 2012.
Who is the man who has shaped Russia more than anyone else since the fall of the Soviet Union? How does the ex-KGB agent – who was stationed in the former GDR in the 1980s and, back in Moscow, rose to become head of the secret service, Minister President and finally President within a period of four years – respond to the new challenge? Putin, the man “who has a way with people”, as his old friend Sergey Rodulgin describes him; Putin, who waged a decades-long all-out bloody war against separatist Chechnya; and Putin, whose authoritarian style, after the chaotic years under Yeltsin, transformed the natural resources giant Russia into a relatively stable country whose wealth is growing.
Multiple award-winning television filmmaker Hubert Seipel follows Putin through Russia for weeks in a surprisingly personal observation of one of the most powerful politicians in the world on his most difficult election campaign yet. In addition to Vladimir Putin, Hubert Seipel interviews numerous fellow travellers and opposition members.

Production note

In “Yellow Cake” Joachim Tschirner accompanies the most gigantic clean-up operation in the history of uranium mining and takes the audience on a journey from Central Germany around half the world.
Uranium mining, the first chain link of the nuclear energy production, has always been out of the public eye. A web of propaganda, disinformation and outright lies covers its 65-year history. In the East German provinces of Saxony and Thuringia the former third largest uranium producer worldwide was located. Operating until German Unification, it had the code name WISMUT and supplied the Soviet Union with a total of 220,000 tons of uranium until 1990. For each ton, ten thousand times its weight in rocks had to be extracted, processed and deposited somewhere. As a result, unimaginable quantities of highly toxic and radioactive waste were produced. During the last twenty years, thousands of former miners have been making gigantic efforts to deal with this past. Recovering the radioactive waste will cost the tax payers almost seven billion Euros in the end, but the end is nowhere in sight.
While the question whether the radioactive waste produced by uranium mining can be made secure for thousands of years is still open, uranium prices on the global market are constantly rising – twenty-fold during the making of this film alone.

Production note