Carl-Ludwig Rettinger

In the Shadows of Dreams

The story of a great friendship between Bruno Balz and Michael Jary. The most successful duo in schlager and film music has shaped German-language popular culture for five decades. The wild twenties, then cinema glamour and Gestapo imprisonment, new beginnings, and swinging sixties - their songs are still alive today.

Welcome to Babel

Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen's plans to create an epic work depicting his homeland's tumultuous recent history.

The Lady with the Arrows

Now ninety-three years old, Claudia Andujar managed to survive the Holocaust as a child. The award-winning photographer has been travelling the Amazon since the 1960s. This has resulted in a profound contact with the Yanomami people. The Yanomami learnt from Andujar how to defend themselves against the overexploitation of the rainforest and their expulsion. Victims become activists.

Loving Highsmith

The story of the life, loves and work of US writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-95), told through her unpublished diaries, her own voice and that of those who knew her, both family and close friends.

The Final Twist

After three unsuccessful attempts at the Olympics, the 30-year-old Aljona Savchenko finally wants to win a gold medal with a new partner in four years. A rather bold plan, especially since the young Frenchman Bruno Massot, chosen by the German-Ukrainian ice princess, has no international successes in pairs figure skating. He moves to Germany and has no idea of the manic perfectionist he's getting involved with. Aljona's training is tough. Constant disputes about the right course threaten to bring the project to failure. Two completely different characters collide. However, the team of trainers manages to calm things down. February 2018: The competition at the Winter Olympics in South Korea begins with the short program. Inexplicably, Bruno blunders and the pair sit fourth by a wide gap. Gold is hardly possible anymore. It only remains for them to show the world their unique free skating. Their intoxicating, perfect run will go down in history. It will be the free skating of their life!

Bread: An Everyday Miracle

The simple staple bread has become a branded product with an increasing number of varieties and providers. The film provides authentic impressions in today’s world of bread. We encounter small craft bakers as well as corporate CEOs whose professional work is our daily bread and ask the question: how do you see the future of our bread? And: what are we actually eating?

Letters from Athens

With the German Occupation in Greece (1941-1944) as a background, this film tells the love story between my father, an assistant professor at the mysterious German Scientific Institute of Athens - financed by the occupying power, Germany, but in reality a refuge for resistant students - and Nelly, a young student in Fine Arts. The film also traces the portrait of their friend Rudolf Fahrner, founder of the Institute, comrade of the Stauffenberg Brothers and one of the few conspirators of the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, on 20 July 1944, that survived the repression that followed.

I Shot My Love

Seventy years after his grandfather escapes from Nazi Germany to Palestine, Israeli documentary director Tomer Heymann returns to the country of his ancestors to present his film "Paper Dolls" at the Berlin International Film Festival, and there meets a man who will change his life. This 48-hour love affair, originating in Berghain Panorama Bar, develops into a significant relationship between Tomer and Andreas Merk, a German dancer.

Si-Gueriki, Queen Mother

Si-Gueriki is the story of the confrontation of a young man with his history, his roots and culture.

Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made

In 1993, Sam Fuller takes Jim Jarmusch on a trip into Brazil's Mato Grosso, up the River Araguaia to the village of Santa Isabel Do Morro, where 40 years before, Zanuck had sent Fuller to scout a location and write a script for a movie based on a tigrero, a jaguar hunter. Sam hopes to find people who remember him, and he takes film he shot in 1954. He's Rip Van Winkle, and, indeed, a great deal changed in the village. There are televisions, watches, and brick houses. But, the same Karajá culture awaits as well. He gathers the villagers to show his old film footage, and people recognize friends and relatives, thanking Fuller for momentarily bringing them back to life.

Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees

Computer programmer/beekeeper Jacob gets a "television" implanted in his brain by a race of telekinetic bees, which causes him to experience severe hallucinations.

Made in Hollywood

Steeped in irony, Made in Hollywood depicts the personal and cultural mediation of reality and fantasy, desire and identity, by the myths of television and cinema. Quoting from a catalogue of popular styles and sources, from TV commercials to The Wizard of Oz, the Yonemotos construct a parable of the Hollywood image-making industry from a pastiche of narrative cliches: A small-town ingenue goes West to find her dream and loses her innocence; the patriarch of a Hollywood studio nears death; a New York couple seeks screenwriting fame and fortune in the movies. With deadpan humor and hyperbolic visual stylization, the Yonemotos layer artifice upon artifice, constructing an image-world where reality and representation, truth and simulation, are meaningless distinctions.

Krieg der Töne

The 12 year old Ina struggle to become a great pianist. Success depends on the music competition "Ein Herz für Mozart". Ina is sent by her mother's command to piano lessons. The piano teacher Holger produces in his free time experimental music from sound collages, but can not prevail with his works in the professional music business. Ina takes a liking to the sound collages of Holger and flees from her domineering mother to him.