Burkhard Althoff

The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future

A Chilean family is shaken by the sudden return of a long-dead matriarch.

Prayers for the Stolen

Ana and her two best friends, Maria and Paula, navigate life in their oppressive countryside village. Whilst their families struggle in the poppy fields harvesting opium, the girls try to grow alongside the creeping terror of their cartel oppressors.

80.000 Schnitzel

Battering, breading, frying – Berta has prepared thousands of schnitzels in her old cast-iron pan over the years. This 83-year-old landlady’s life on the family farm with adjoining guest house in the Upper Palatinate has been marked by constant hard work. A life that her granddaughters Monika and Hannah never wanted to lead. Now, the deeply indebted farm is on the brink of collapse. Despite having an academic background and contrary to her intentions, Monika, in her early thirties, decides to give up her modern life and save the family business. The two women join forces and give themselves a year to sort out the farm’s problems.

Mülheim Texas – Helge Schneider hier und dort

Helge Schneider's extraordinary talent is his ability to improvise which shows his unfailing creativity. "I paint the everyday-life in the brightest colors myself", he says about himself. Reality and fiction are tough to tell apart in his life. How does a man like him, who doesn't want his audience to know too much about himself, react on a documentary portraying him as a person?

September

The death of a pet prompts the unraveling of a woman.

Gangsterläufer

A knife in the pocket, adrenaline in the blood and only one dream in mind: to be a gangster - and the biggest one at that. Yehya was 15 years old and close to realizing his dream when he met the filmmaker Christian Stahl in the stairwell. Yehya wasn't just the nice boy from next door, he was also "the Boss of Sonnenallee" - one of the gangster runners of the Berlin borough of Neukölln. And gangster runners want to make it in the gangster world. In the eyes of the authorities, he is an "intensive offender"; in his own eyes, Yehya is "one of the top ten of Neukölln. I got my own prosecutor!"

The Robber

A champion marathoner leads a double life as a serial bank robber, sprinting between fixes (and away from police cavalcades) as many as three times a day.

Frozen Angels

A scientific and social exploration of the future of human reproductive technology. In vitro fertilization, sperm banks' potential repercussions and the ethics of genetically engineering babies are among the issues examined.