Frank Scheuffele

Skill Issue

The project is inspired by the director’s own youth during his time at a boarding school in southern Germany. Presents the dilemmas of adolescence between cravings to belong to the group and thirst for freedom.

Reproduction

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.

Gestern, ich denke an morgen

Marion experiences a day. It could be yesterday, but not tomorrow, because at the end of the day she is dead, stumbled in a moment of routine.

Human Flowers of Flesh

Ida lives on a sailing yacht with a crew of five men. While on shore leave in Marseilles, she becomes fascinated with the French Foreign Legion and decides to sail to Sidi Bel Abbès, the Legion's former headquarters in Algeria.

La empresa

La empresa is a strange creature of a most ambiguous nature: a fiction film about documentary filmmaking as fiction filmmaking, and what it all does to a region’s economy as well as a collective psychology. Or is it? Isn’t it more to the point to say that... But before we get lost here, let’s state what La empresa talks about: how the caminata nocturna, the illegal crossing of the border between Mexico and the United States, was turned into a business that ranges from four-hour night-time tours for tourists out for a sick thrill to reenactments for film and television crews. The latter, of course, is at the core of André Siegers’ casually ironic look at this economy of disaster. When the Germans arrive in town, they meet a workforce already in place and willing to play to any national stereotype – as the French seem to get other kicks out of presenting the caminata nocturna than the Netflix internationals.

At the Bottom of the Sea

In south-western Texas, elongated mountain ranges, broad valleys, prairies and deserts pass by. At the Bottom of the Sea explores this imposing landscape and its many meanings, starting with its timeless beauty that has inspired many painters. Once, this part of the earth's crust was part of the ocean floor; the compressed skeletons of billions of sea creatures are now mined as limestone.

Olanda

Tells the story of mushroom pickers who, in the summer and autumn months head, to the southern Carpathians of Romania to begin their search. Far from being a leisure activity, for many of the pickers this is a main source of income which they and their families rely on to get by. In makeshift campsites, they spend months between dense coniferous forests and the Transalpina road, where they sell the gathered mushrooms to passing tourists or people on weekend breaks. The majority of their harvest is taken by intermediaries, who sell the mushrooms abroad for many times the price.

Die Gabe zu heilen

The film tells the stories of five people with special abilities who treat and heal their patients in an unconventional way. These charismatic healers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland are the subjects of this documentary which sets out to show how their old-school, arcane methods can serve as an addition to conventional, academic medicine.