Tim Klimes

From Nightlife To Nightmare

The Hamas terror attack had dramatic consequences for people in Israel, the Gaza Strip and around the world. Here, we hear individual stories from people living in Tel Aviv. What were their lives like before 7 October 2023? What’s their current perception of the war? What do they see, when they look to the future? In the summer of 2023, Tel Aviv was a lively, liberal and open metropolis, known as the “Mediterranean Capital of Cool”. Then came October 7, and changed everything. Here, people’s lives are forever divided: into ‘before’, and ‘after’. Club owners, culture workers, restaurateurs, LGBTQ activists and architects share very personal insights into a traumatized society. And they’ve not given up hope for better times once the war is over.

Music Under the Swastika - The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz

The stories of Jewish cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived Auschwitz, and of star conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who worked with the Nazis, provide insight. The film centers around two people who represent musical culture during the Third Reich - albeit in very different ways. Wilhelm Furtwängler was a star conductor; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the cellist of the infamous Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. Both shared a love for the classical German music.

Jean-Michel Frank - Tragic Genius of Art Deco

Jean-Michel Frank designed style-defining interiors in the 1920s with the timeless ideal of simplicity. He worked in Paris with artists like Giacometti and Dali, and designed interiors for millionaires like Nelson Rockefeller and Templeton Crocker. The documentary tells of an amazing but tragic life of the innovative interior designer.

Kampf auf der Bosporus-Brücke - Die Türkei und der gescheiterte Putschversuch

The night of July 15, 2016 changed the history of Turkey. On that day there were coordinated attacks by parts of the Turkish army, among others in Istanbul. The aim of the military: a coup against the government. The decisive confrontation occurred on the Bosporus Bridge. While President Erdogan was still on vacation, live at TV he called on the people who were devoted to him to stand against the military. As an enemy for the masses, he presented his adversary Fethullah Gülen, whom he branded as the coup leader. He also urged the imams of the country's mosques to condition the population to resist. And so it happens that at night thousands of agitated people take to the streets to oppose the armed insurgents. The death toll was high. 352 people died across Turkey during the attempted coup. The consequences are even more serious: Erdogan used this gift, as he called it himself, to undermine democracy, to arrange mass arrests of dissidents and to transform Turkey into a dictatorship.

Schuss in der Nacht - Die Ermordung Walter Lübckes

On June 1st, 2019, around 11:30pm, the shoot which represents a turning point in the federal republic falls. In the hessian small town Wolfhagen-Istha, the district president of Kassel, Walter Lübcke, is murdered during this night, while, just a few meters away, the annual carnival is putting the locals into a festive mood. It is DNA-evidence on the clothes of Walter Lübcke which leads the investigators on June 15th, 2019, to his presumptive murderer: Stephan Ernst. The previously convicted right-wing extremist Ernst gets arrested by a SEK unit in Kassel. A first background check reveals: Stephan Ernst was known to the security authorities, but they did not have him on their radar for six years. Now he is back. And a person is dead. The docu-drama “Schuss in der Nacht” („Shoot in the dark“) tells emotionally, and simultaneously factually, how the deadly attack on Lübcke came to be. It tells about the first far-right motivated murder of a politician since the era of national socialism.