Benny Drechsel

Between Us

Ilyas and Yasemin are a couple in love - until Yasemin is shot by an unknown assailant in their shared café. Ilyas' life, as well as that of their daughter Senna, completely falls apart. And as the police begin to link him and his deceased wife to the crime, Ilyas finds himself utterly bewildered. The longer the suspicions persist, the more he wonders: Was Yasemin truly the woman he loved?

Great Freedom

In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Nevertheless, over the decades, he continues his quest for freedom and love, even if he finds it in the most unusual places.

The Taste of Pho

A Warsaw-based Vietnamese cook struggles to fit into the European culture, which his ten-year-old daughter has already embraced as her own. A story about love, misunderstanding and food.

1986

Elena is a student in Minsk. She is having an intense but self-destructive love affair with Viktor. When Elena's father goes to prison she has to take charge of his business dealings to help him. She drives repeatedly into the restricted zone at Chernobyl, behind the wheel of a truck, in order to smuggle contaminated steel. The conflicts with Viktor escalate, and Elena is increasingly captivated by the zone's deceptive beauty...

Three Peaks

Aaron invites his girlfriend Lea and her 8-year-old son Tristan on a trip to the mountains. What could be a starting point of a new life together, slowly turns into difficult territory as the three fight for their positions within the new family.

The Young Karl Marx

26 year-old Karl Marx embarks with his wife, Jenny, on the road to exile. In 1844 in Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, an industrialist’s son, who has been investigating the sordid birth of the British working class. Engels, the dandy, provides the last piece of the puzzle to the young Karl Marx’s new vision of the world. Together, between censorship and the police’s repression, riots and political upheavals, they will lead the labor movement during its development into a modern era.

We Will Stay in Touch about It

A man drives through a deserted landscape. Suddenly his car hits a person, seriously hurting or even killing him. The driver searches for the body, cannot find it - and must accept, that there is no one. Instead, he does find blood on the broken windshield. What happens when realizing that we kill - without being confronted with the dead?

My Sweet Pepper Land

Baran, a war hero, becomes sheriff of the capital and refuses to bow down to a tribal chief.

The Lunchbox

A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system (Mumbai's Dabbawallahs) connects a young housewife to a stranger in the dusk of his life. They build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.

Harmony Lessons

During a medical examination, 13-year-old Aslan is humiliated in front of a load of his fellow pupils. The incident unleashes his latent personality disorder. Plagued by self-doubt, he strives for cleanliness and perfection and is obsessed with trying to control everything around him. His compulsion draws Aslan, who lives with his grandmother in a village in Kazakhstan, into increasingly difficult situations. He abhors the way most of his fellow pupils are held in the sway of a criminal scheme, in which Bolat, one of Aslan’s tormentors, is also involved. Bolat blackmails the younger children into paying him protection money; he has nothing but contempt for ostracised Aslan.

Far End of the Milky Way

A small one-street village in the open landscape of East Germany, marked by the political changes of the past decade and long forgotten by the rest of society. FAR END OF THE MILKY WAY is a trip to the periphery of society. Wealth and jobs are scarce around here, but people want to stay regardless. With stubbornness and a sense of humor, they make the best of their situation. FAR END OF THE MILKY WAY is a film about work and love, your garden as your pub, ashes in the snow and slaughtering pigs

The River Used to Be a Man

A drama centered on a white man lost in the Botswana marshlands.

Lore

After being abandoned by their Nazi parents at the end of World War II, five German siblings embark on a harrowing journey across their war-torn country. Led by the eldest, 14 year-old Lore, the children are forced to confront their parents’ actions and the reality of a new world.

A Mysterious World

Boris is stunned when his girlfriend Ana asks for some time apart. He doesn't know why and she can't explain it. Some time can mean so many things. How much time apart? A week, a month, years? During this imprecise period of uncertainty, Boris is left at the mercy of chance. His life transforms into an erratic urban journey: moving into a transient hotel, buying a temperamental communist-era car, meeting up with a long-lost classmate, random encounters with other women and repeatedly trying to get back together with Ana.

The Slut

Tamar, an attractive single mother, lives alone in a small village with her two daughters. Unsatisfied, she attempts to fill her many voids through meaningless sexual rendezvous.

Catapult

Norbert Witte, once the king of the only amusement park of the former GDR, today he is behind bars in Germany. When fleeing bankruptcy in Berlin, Norbert Witte and his family secretly shipped their rollercoasters to Peru. Things went wrong here too. In a desperate attempt, Norbert tried to smuggle cocaine to Germany. Three years later his 23 years old son Marcel was sentenced to 20 years in a Peruvian prison. Now the father is doing everything he can in order to free his son.

Snow

The daily hardships of a war-scarred Bosnian village, where all that remains are widows and orphans, are painstakingly documented in this first feature from director Aida Begic. Snow offers insight about the psychological aftereffects of the 1992-95 civil war from a distinctively female point of view without showing any of the brutality or carnage.

Twilight

In the last winter of WWII a group of captive German soldiers is brought to a remote Russian village, where widows, a child and a crippled are the only ones left. This is a military drama about those, who can love and forgive.