Ingo Fliess

Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting

Out of her love for the great thinker Leibniz, Queen Charlotte commissions a portrait of him. During the portrait sessions, the philosopher and the young painter engage in a passionate struggle for truth in image and likeness, and ultimately for love and death.

Motherland

Director Miriam Pucitta grew up as the child of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s. She herself has only fragmentary memories of this time; her mother and other relatives evade Miriam's questions. Together with her daughter Giulia, she researches her family's living conditions in Switzerland and finds a new understanding of her parents' difficult decisions.

In Wolf Country

We all know the big bad wolf of fairy-tale fame—over hundreds of years the wolf has become a culturally imprinted symbol of fear that’s completely detached from reality. In fact there weren’t even any wolves in western Europe for a long time. But they’re back—for example in Germany, where these social animals now occupy a few scattered areas around the country that people have left to them.

The Teachers' Lounge

When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her.

The Silent Forest

As a forestry student doing an internship, Anja Grimm ends up in that remote area in the Upper Palatinate Forest, where she went on vacation with her parents as an eight-year-old girl and her father disappeared without a trace. Her job is to take soil samples to create a soil map. At one point in the forest floor she comes across abnormal irregularities. Not long after their arrival, a brutal murder occurs. Anja soon arouses suspicion and hostility not only among the villagers with her suspicion that the perpetrator knows something about her father's fate and with her questions about the atypical soil composition in the forest clearing. Even the police react extremely reservedly to their investigations. And when it turns out that the young woman can read the signs of the forest like an open book, forces mobilize in the village who are apparently ready for anything because there is a dark secret that needs to be kept.

Tales of Franz

Franz is by far the smallest in the class, has blond ringlets and gets a high-pitched squeaky voice when he gets upset. Luckily, two best friends help: Gabi and Eberhard. When Franz discovers Hank Haberer's "10 rules for a real man" for himself one day, turbulence is inevitable and the friendship of the three gets into trouble.

The Girl With the Golden Hands

East Germany, in autumn 1999. Gudrun Pfaff is about to turn sixty when she finds out that the orphanage she grew up in is being sold to turn into a hotel, and she is willing to do anything to stop it.

I Was, I Am, I Will Be

While Kurdish gigolo Baran dreams of a future in Europe, German pilot Marion is struggling to come to terms with her cancer diagnosis. When the two meet at the Turkish holiday resort of Marmaris, they engage in a kind of double-cross and decide to enter into a sham marriage. After a promising beginning, a shared future seems well within their reach. But things turn out not to be quite as simple as that.

Wackersdorf

Not an easy decision! District Administrator Hans Schuierer from the Upper Palatinate first opposed his own political line in 1981 and finally against the entire Bavarian Free State and Prime Minister Strauss. Because the planned reprocessing plant Wackersdorf promised 3,000 new jobs for the structurally weak region - but what if these are associated with massive health and ecological damage for future generations? Isn't it then the duty of a politician and citizen to resist?

4

A documentary on one of the world’s most exciting string quartets – the Quatuor Ébène – draws viewers into the musicians’ struggle with interpretational details, with colleague-friends – and with themselves.

Mission Control Texas

"The Atheist Experience," produced in Austin, Texas, is the only atheist TV show in the United States. Every Sunday afternoon, two atheists debate callers for one hour, on camera. "Mission Control Texas" portrays the show, its protagonists, and the discussions between the hosts and callers. The debates between believers and skeptics are funny, touching, and shocking in turn, and they're interspersed with footage of the very public religious displays common in the state of Texas. The film is an intimate, concentrated, and entertaining insight into the culture wars, and is sure to provoke inspiration as well as frustration, no matter which side of the divide you fall on.

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

For six months of the year, renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria closes his restaurant El Bulli -- repeatedly voted the world's best -- and works with his culinary team to prepare the menu for the next season. An elegant, detailed study of food as avant-garde art, EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS is a rare inside look at some of the world's most innovative and exciting cooking; as Adria himself puts it, "the more bewilderment, the better!"

How to Make a Book with Steidl

For 40 years, Gerhard Steidl has combined the roles of printer and publisher, resolved to personally check each sheet leaving his printing shop in Göttingen. This perfectionism, combined with an unconditional love for books, for the traditional printing craft, and a commitment to the quality standards of manufacturing (in the original sense of the word, made by hand), has gained worldwide attention. The most internationally renowned photographic artists vie for the opportunity to collaborate with Gerhard Steidl, to conceive and produce the perfect publication with him.

Yellow Letters

Follows Derya and Aziz, a famous actress and a professor of dramatic arts at the university in Ankara, who lose their jobs and move in with Aziz's parents in Istanbul along with their teenage daughter, putting their privacy in danger and their marriage under pressure.