8 Bullets
Frank Ternier
A French expat businessman in Taipei with a hole in his head who is lost in thought is driven over the edge by his obsession: the smell of fried fish.
D
Film Archive
8 Bullets
A French expat businessman in Taipei with a hole in his head who is lost in thought is driven over the edge by his obsession: the smell of fried fish. In reality, he is chasing the scent of revenge, one that will be fiercely wreaked with 8 bullets.
Through different points of view and flashbacks that are entangled like the tentacles of an octopus a disjointed narrative is built around a core of muted lines, backgrounds and colours.
Victor Orozco
Through different points of view and flashbacks that are entangled like the tentacles of an octopus a disjointed narrative is built around a core of muted lines, backgrounds and colours.
Victor Orozco
9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo
Thomas Vroege, Floor van der Meulen
The photographer Issa Touma can’t leave is flat in Aleppo – there’s a fierce battle raging on his doorstep: Assad’s army against the insurgents, and then the IS enters the fray.
9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo
Documentary Film
Netherlands,
Syria
2015
13 minutes
subtitles:
English
The photographer Issa Touma can’t leave is flat in Aleppo – there’s a fierce battle raging on his doorstep: Assad’s army against the insurgents, and then the IS enters the fray. Issa points his camera at himself and, through the lowered blinds, out of the window, producing an authentic image that may seem familiar to people from conflict regions: televised news images, the sounds of real fighting outside and the “normality” of everyday life – the perversions of war.
Zaza Rusadze
Zaza Rusadze
A Baptism of Fire
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
The lives of young war reporters who travel to crisis spots at their own expense and risk their lives to shoot the picture that will change everything. A precarious job.
A Baptism of Fire
Documentary Film
France
2015
58 minutes
subtitles:
English
French
Credits
Jérôme Caza – 2P2L
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
Ael Dallier Vega
Jérôme Clément-Wilz
Nowadays countless journalists and photographers are travelling the world to supply us with the latest news and images from conflict regions. Stories of heroic war reporters were often told in the cinema. Jérôme Clément-Wilz takes a different perspective: news journalism is an industry, too. Many freelance photographers, most of them young, travel to hotspots at their own expense – hoping to shoot the life-changing picture at the right place at the right time and sell it for a high price to the leading media or agencies. The film is an intimate observation of the lives of young French reporters that gives them the space to reflect on their work. Their dreams come true in the Arab Spring: their pictures make it to the cover pages of the biggest dailies. And yet Clément-Wilz avoids heroic pathos, concentrating instead on his young protagonists’ spirit of adventure and youthful recklessness on the one hand and on the tough business where there are no safety nets and where the ones who risk their lives most readily have the best chances of survival on the other. War reporter – a precarious job.
Zaza Rusadze
Zaza Rusadze
Als wir die Zukunft waren
Lars Barthel, Gabriele Denecke, Andreas Voigt, Peter Kahane, Thomas Knauf, Hannes Schönemann. Ralf Marschalleck
People who were born in the 1950s in the GDR: the childhood memories of a generation. Six miniatures, rich in wit, nostalgia, and poetry. The echo of a utopia.
Als wir die Zukunft waren
Credits
Barbara Etz
Lars Barthel, Gabriele Denecke, Andreas Voigt, Peter Kahane, Thomas Knauf, Hannes Schönemann. Ralf Marschalleck
Marcel Noll
Lars Barthel, Andreas Köfer, Thomas Plenert, Marcus Lenz, Sebastian Hattop
Grete Jentzen, Gudrun Steinbrück-Plenert, Pamela Homann, Mathieu Honoré
motionworks Halle, Jörg Herrmann
Uwe Busch, Maurice Wilkering, Thomas Funk, Nic Nagel
Generations define themselves by the future – sometimes there’s too little, sometimes too much. The generation born in the GDR in the 1950s were taught from an early age that they were the future of socialism. Quite a responsibility. And it didn’t quite work out, either.
The six male and one female directors of this omnibus film have their socialisation in common, and the fact that they all worked for DEFA. Nonetheless, their memories of childhood in a country that was still marked by the war, but also by a spirit of departure, are stylistically very different: from strict visual concepts to the exuberant use of animation or re-enacted scenes. They are strongest when they are visually condensed, opening associative spaces, or when they manage to tell their story from a child’s perspective, but with the knowledge of the adult. Most of them are children who lose first their father and then their faith in socialism. An interesting aspect is that the West didn’t only mean fragrant parcels, Westerns, toy guns or Uncle Alfred but also departed fathers. And even the fathers who stayed were mostly absent. The East, that was the mothers, beautiful and strong. Sometimes it broke them.
Ultimately, the problem was that socialism didn’t have faith in its children. Their narratives are like the echo of a utopia.
Grit Lemke
The six male and one female directors of this omnibus film have their socialisation in common, and the fact that they all worked for DEFA. Nonetheless, their memories of childhood in a country that was still marked by the war, but also by a spirit of departure, are stylistically very different: from strict visual concepts to the exuberant use of animation or re-enacted scenes. They are strongest when they are visually condensed, opening associative spaces, or when they manage to tell their story from a child’s perspective, but with the knowledge of the adult. Most of them are children who lose first their father and then their faith in socialism. An interesting aspect is that the West didn’t only mean fragrant parcels, Westerns, toy guns or Uncle Alfred but also departed fathers. And even the fathers who stayed were mostly absent. The East, that was the mothers, beautiful and strong. Sometimes it broke them.
Ultimately, the problem was that socialism didn’t have faith in its children. Their narratives are like the echo of a utopia.
Grit Lemke
Animated Minds: Stories of Post-Natal Depression – Katie's Story
The multiple award winning series “Animated Minds”, launched in 2003, visualises the interior worlds of mentally disordered people. The new instalment shows women who suffered from postnatal depression after the birth of their children. Katie talks of her feelings of guilt and powerlessness in the face of this new situation in her life. The animation makes her feelings and thoughts visible.
Annegret Richter
Annegret Richter
Animated Minds: Stories of Post-Natal Depression – Mike's Story
Dan Binns
It’s a little-known fact that postnatal depression affects not only women who find no access to their child and new life after birth. The disorder also radically changes their partners’ and families’ lives.
Animated Minds: Stories of Post-Natal Depression – Mike's Story
It’s a little-known fact that postnatal depression affects not only women who find no access to their child and new life after birth. The disorder also radically changes their partners’ and families’ lives. This episode of “Animated Minds” shows how Mike experiences the situation as a man and father.
Annegret Richter
Annegret Richter
Automatic Fitness
Alejandra Tomei, Alberto Couceiro
Life on an exacting conveyor belt. This detailed puppet animation that sparkles with ideas is a scathing satire on our brave new working world that thinks the term “human resources” through to the end and invents a new running technique in the process.
Automatic Fitness
Animated Film
Germany
2015
21 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Imagine waking up in the morning in your bed, which stands on an assembly line. An automatic wake-up call and a few pills handed to you by robots make you fit for the working day. And so on and so forth at a predetermined speed. Life on an exacting conveyor belt. This detailed puppet animation that sparkles with ideas is a scathing satire on our brave new working world that thinks the term “human resources” through to the end and invents a new running technique in the process.
Lars Meyer
Healthy Worklplaces Film Award 2015
Lars Meyer
Healthy Worklplaces Film Award 2015
Back Home
Inna Denisova
Coming home to Simferopol. Encounters with fanatical Putin supporters and critics who have to leave Crimea. An authentic look at a deeply divided society.
Back Home
We’ll probably never know exactly how the annexation of Crimea happened. But Inna Denisova, who realised this no budget film with lots of energy, is not concerned with the covert army operations or the open political rhetoric. She is interested in the subtle atmospheric shifts that come with the geopolitical ones. How do you live in a sea of Russian white, blue and red and graffiti posters that some see as promises of happiness and others as chauvinistic boasts? Denisova counters Putin’s great project of bringing the peninsula back into the realm with her own small, very personal return to her native city, Simferopol. Two versions of “Back Home” – and the question of what this was, is and will be: home, belonging, childhood.
She talks to old school friends, artists and gallery owners, avoiding all polemics. Some stay, many leave. Whether interviewing a friend of director Oleg Sencov (sentenced to 20 years hard labour for “terrorism” without a scrap of evidence) or looking at the extremely martial re-enactment event culture (tank lightshows for the whole family), whether talking to a cartoonist who has no more tourists to draw, which is why he now portrays Zhirinovsky and the “friendly little people” of the annexation … one thing becomes clear: it’s a deeply divided society whose individual members feel even more deeply insecure.
Barbara Wurm
She talks to old school friends, artists and gallery owners, avoiding all polemics. Some stay, many leave. Whether interviewing a friend of director Oleg Sencov (sentenced to 20 years hard labour for “terrorism” without a scrap of evidence) or looking at the extremely martial re-enactment event culture (tank lightshows for the whole family), whether talking to a cartoonist who has no more tourists to draw, which is why he now portrays Zhirinovsky and the “friendly little people” of the annexation … one thing becomes clear: it’s a deeply divided society whose individual members feel even more deeply insecure.
Barbara Wurm
Between the Devil and the Deep
Heinrich Dahms
South African fishermen struggling to survive in the face of an official ban on fishing. Black fishing, drugs, family dramas, a love that falls apart, and always the sea.
Between the Devil and the Deep
Documentary Film
Netherlands
2015
98 minutes
subtitles:
English
There may be quite a few arguments in favour of protecting the endangered species of the abalone. Sold as an aphrodisiac in Asia, they are worth a lot of money and therefore almost extinct off the coast of South Africa. But the government’s ban on catching them primarily affects the fishermen, the weakest link in the production chain. What to do when there’s no other source of income? They dive for abalones illegally, which triggers a new cycle of violence and counter-violence, criminalisation and justice. Which is what the Dutch filmmaker Heinrich Dahms’s film portrays, exemplified by a small fishing village near Kapstadt. The stories of three families who are victims of the fishing ban coalesce into the portrait of a community crushed between the daily struggle for survival and the pitfalls of a corrupt and violent law enforcement system. The director creates impressive insights into the dangers (and beauty) of fishing as well as the lives and problems of his protagonists: a drowned son and the fight against the investigating authorities, the father of a family persecuted by the police, a meth-addicted small-time crook about to lose his wife’s love. Life in the new South Africa, as the film also shows, is full of disappointments.
Matthias Heeder
Matthias Heeder
Black Sheep
Christian Cerami
Two brothers from a suburb in Northern England come under the influence of the right-wing “English Defence League”, known for its vociferous anti-Islam stance.
Black Sheep
Credits
Alex Sedgley
Christian Cerami
Simon Plunkett
Samuel Haskell
Vicky Harris
Two brothers from a suburb in Northern England come under the influence of the right-wing “English Defence League”, known for its vociferous anti-Islam stance. What starts as curiosity becomes a trip into the world of tough boys with outspoken attitudes for the older one and a nightmare for the 13-year-old Jack. With a feature-film-like camera the director captures the battle of wills between more than two different characters with impressive precision. Cornelia Klauß
Daddy's Girl
Melisa Üneri
Melisa moves to Turkey to escape her domineering father. But Granny is already waiting – Daddy, ten times worse … A magnificent black comedy about reaching adulthood.
Daddy's Girl
Documentary Film
Finland
2015
52 minutes
subtitles:
English
Granted, one doesn’t have to go to the movies to learn that families are a nuisance. But this film has more to offer. For example a family that is uniquely terrible in an almost made-for-the-movies way and gleefully plays this out for the camera. “Daddy’s Girl”, that’s the director, though everyone in this family wants to direct. Daddy himself most of all, a natural as a movie hero, rather exhausting as a father. A Turk who raised his daughter alone in Finland. (We will learn why he didn’t return home.) In order to escape his oppressive, dominant love, Melisa moves to the only place where Daddy is guaranteed not to follow her: Turkey. But that’s where Granny is waiting – Daddy, ten times worse. The family conflict is now exacerbated by a cultural conflict, because Granny knows exactly what respectable women should do and what they shouldn’t …
A brilliant black comedy full of cleverly observed and deployed details in which at least two of the three main protagonists are trying to make each other’s life hell according to every rule in the book of spitefulness. Behind all this is the question of how a generation whose parents removed every obstacle in their path can ever liberate themselves. In Istanbul Melisa meets angry young people whose Gezi protests are also directed against their parents’ generation.
Grit Lemke
A brilliant black comedy full of cleverly observed and deployed details in which at least two of the three main protagonists are trying to make each other’s life hell according to every rule in the book of spitefulness. Behind all this is the question of how a generation whose parents removed every obstacle in their path can ever liberate themselves. In Istanbul Melisa meets angry young people whose Gezi protests are also directed against their parents’ generation.
Grit Lemke
Der Auftritt
Francesca Bertin
A short film for all those who have always been interested in the secret of cultivated conversation. And if you’re not interested: come anyway! Maybe you’ll learn something about your karma.
Der Auftritt
Credits
Francesca Bertin, Leonhard Kaufmann
Francesca Bertin
Leonhard Kaufmann
Leonhard Kaufmann
Francesca Bertin
A short film for all those who have always been interested in the secret of cultivated conversation. And if you’re not interested: come anyway! Maybe you’ll learn something about your karma.
Matthias Heeder
Matthias Heeder
Die Angst des Wolfs vor dem Wolf
Juliane Jaschnow
A howl in the wilderness. A shape moves back and forth in the bloody red flickering light of a double fight – against the wolf, but even more against the fear of the wolf. No escape, the razor’s edge – powerfully eloquent.
Die Angst des Wolfs vor dem Wolf
A howl in the wilderness. A shape moves back and forth in the bloody red flickering light of a double fight – against the wolf, but even more against the fear of the wolf. No escape, the razor’s edge – powerfully eloquent. An equally minimalist and gripping film poem by filmmaker Juliane Jaschnow and writer Stefan Petermann about the dialectics of becoming a victim or a perpetrator. Whatever side you’re on: you’ll lose if you stay as you are.
Nadja Rademacher
Nadja Rademacher
Dissonance
Till Nowak
This state of general irritation, however, suits Till Nowak brilliantly as he portrays the confusion of his protagonist, a homeless piano player, his psychoses and the fears of everyone involved.
Dissonance
Animated Film
Germany
2015
15 minutes
subtitles:
English
It’s getting harder and harder to draw boundaries between film genres. And why should we? Fantasy and reality are as close to each other as documentary, fiction and animated film. Of course this disintegration of the traditional order can be scary, for what is now right? This state of general irritation, however, suits Till Nowak brilliantly as he portrays the confusion of his protagonist, a homeless piano player, his psychoses and the fears of everyone involved.
Annegret Richter
Annegret Richter
Don't Lose Your Head
Karolina Specht
Far too much of the content of human communication never goes beyond a short-lived mind game. The speech bubbles devour themselves like the revolution which devours its children, while the system keeps reproducing itself. Is this about media, the church, politics? Let everybody decide for themselves.
Don't Lose Your Head
Animated Film
Poland
2015
4 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Far too much of the content of human communication never goes beyond a short-lived mind game. The speech bubbles devour themselves like the revolution which devours its children, while the system keeps reproducing itself. Is this about media, the church, politics? Let everybody decide for themselves. This ironic computer animation gives the talking heads’ spiral of repetition another turn of the screw, using not language but images: the graphic icons which make our communication easier. Or not.
Lars Meyer
Lars Meyer
Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll
John Pirozzi
Hypnotic rhythms, exotic sounds, cool singers: East Asian rock, wiped out by the Khmer Rouge. Time travel with magical archive material.
Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll
Documentary Film
USA
2014
107 minutes
subtitles:
English
Credits
John Pirozzi, Andrew Pope
John Pirozzi
Scot Stafford
John Pirozzi
Daniel Littlewood, Matthew Prinzing, Greg Wright
In the 1960s and early 70s a new musical style emerged in Cambodia which turned rock’n’roll upside down and created something new by mixing Western sounds with the delicate melodies, hypnotic rhythms and female vocalists of traditional Cambodian music. American filmmaker John Pirozzi takes us on a musical journey of exotic and yet familiar sounds. At the same time he uses archive material and testimonies of witnesses of the time to build a bridge to national history. While the young musicians, along with parts of Cambodian society, were opening up towards Western influences, their country was slowly moving towards the abyss. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge started their cruel elimination of all art and intelligence, including the music scene. The rediscovery of these songs is a late triumph of rock’n’roll.
Zaza Rusadze
Zaza Rusadze
