Can school be exciting and even fun? The integrative pre-vocational August Sander school in Berlin-Friedrichshain at least seems the perfect place for this. The noise of the cars of the big city can be heard from the distance, birds are singing on the lush green grounds. Lessons here include horticulture, agriculture and animal care. And when you watch the students weed garden plots and feed rabbits, things look extremely enviable at first glance. But of course, even in this paradisiacal place there are conflicts, annoying teachers and the anxious question: What comes after graduation?
Every day the shoes from the shoe rack have new adventures. Today, the rubber boots Buddel and Torf tell the other shoes about their experience on a rainy day with a huge dark puddle in the playground, and what trick the unicorn rubber boots Chunk and Tuva used to take away their fear of getting thoroughly dirty … Episode three of the popular KiKA series.
Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Picture postcards, travel brochures and holiday photos are all this merrily caustic collage needs to portray moods and desires between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. In spring 1990, the first Interflug plane carrying GDR citizens touched down on Majorca. About the mediterranean colours of the island, the first-person narrator remarks in the voiceover: “We knew them from the postcards sent by our West German relatives. This was the West, this was West-West.” Ostensibly naïve, her recollections nonetheless develop an ironic undertone. However blue the sea shines in the photos, however loud the castanets play, the travel group with their East German money are never more than onlookers in this half-board paradise. Everything seems like an empty promise: the bursting oranges on the trees, the sumptuous breakfast buffet and the giant hotel pools.
The world stands still. Gaudily painted cruise ships lie in the oil port of Augusta on the south-east coast of Sicily. Their lustre fades a little more every day. On the scorched, tinged 16mm film stock they seem as unfit for the future as the refineries visible behind them. When, if not in the early summer of 2021, would the time have ever been riper for reflection and reassessment?! Old, exploitative economic systems that keep people away from Europe and let only raw materials enter are in lockdown. Their future is unimaginable. But is there a way back? To the gentle sound of the waves, the birds and the insects, the smoke of the industrial plants wafts back into the chimneys. But the images have been damaged.
The camera calmly explores the holes and fissures of a cliff face, the traces of the ocean. The austere landscape seems to have fallen out of time. Only a few decades ago, fishermen threw their trap baskets into the water from here. Today, the sea around Malta has long been fished dry. Punta, a moustachioed islander, wants to have one more go.
We have probably all thought about the influence of digital logic and algorithms on our perception of the world at some point. This equally humorous and profound short film takes the interactive online tour service “Google Street View” as a starting point for an investigation of where the reality mapped by fifteen automatic cameras and the one perceived by human senses drift apart – and what the consequences are.
“You got to try to live your own life,” Arzu, one of the football players from the Turkish-Kreuzberg girls’ team Ağrı Spor, demanded in a 1995 film by Aysun Bademsoy. Today she is in her late forties and leads her own life, like her former teammates Türkan, Nalan and Nazan. Bademsoy visited the four of them for the fourth time, following their lives, recalling their visions for the future from back then. And this time she also talked to their daughters, some of whom on the brink of adulthood, who also think about adaptation, tradition, religion and culture. Little has changed between then and now, being German remains a difficult question to answer for every generation.
Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.
The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.
Paths can lead us home, but we also run along them into the distance. Have you ever really looked at them? Maybe then we wouldn’t be so afraid of change and loneliness. The film is an epitaph for a memory that is constantly being born and dying, and of which we are an inseparable part.
Every time a Ukrainian student returns from a study stay in Europe, she encounters misunderstandings with the older generation due to different perspectives on life. This film captures a conversation between her grandfather and his best friend during their regular tea meetings.
The film tells the story of Marie, who collects flowers from defunct Sudeten German settlements, abandoned after World War II, and grows them in her garden. In this way, she tries to revive the memory of their ancestors, hidden in human stories and the surrounding nature.
An unreproducible space-time allows for a conversation we tried to pretend doesn’t exist. Two years later, we travel from the pond called Murder over the Hill to Paradise Pond. Why are we talking about this only now? This intimate film about a mother and her daughter is both unique and universal.
When hitchhiking, you never know what’s going to happen. You just stand there with a sign, a clear goal and wait for opportunities – or cars – to pull up. Maybe they’ll give you a short lift or take you somewhere completely different – and that’s all good. I wish I could see that in my normal life.
This short documentary film features several (extra)ordinary residents of a nursing home. The author captures selected moments from their lives, their feelings and memories, without the need to evaluate, judge, or evoke pity in the viewer.
This film captures my last day at Labyrinth Lhota Elementary Montessori School. Classmates and guides share their opinions on the benefits of this kind of teaching approach, including an insight into the daily hustle and bustle of alternative education.
Why are you still living with your parents? It’s a question I constantly think about. Is it really wrong? My parents are still living with their parents too. And I’m with them. Is it my fault? What’s keeping me here?
What would an ideal social service look like if clients could design it according to their own ideas? Three people with long-term experience of homelessness, falling through the cracks of social services, along with one boy who still views the world and the people in it with his heart.
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