Veit Helmer

Akiko, the Flying Monkey

The monkey child Akiko lives in the zoo, but his family sends him on a big mission: he is supposed to go out into the world and get his relatives out of the forest. Together they want to free the animals from the zoo

Gondola

In the Georgian mountains, a cable car connects a village with a smaller town in the valley. Iva started working for the cable car as a conductor and is now in charge of handling the gondolas. While one gondola goes up to the village, the other goes down to the valley. Halfway down, the gondolas meet every half hour. This is exactly the moment when Iva and Nina, the conductor of the other gondola, meet each time. Where at the beginning only collegial greetings were exchanged, over time a flirtation develops. What follows is the big love and stress with the boss.

The Bra

Train driver Nurlan’s heading to Baku for the last time before retirement, but on his fateful journey around the neighborhoods of the city his train snags a blue bra off a washing line. To escape from his lonely existence, Nurlan embarks on the most adventurous journey of his life: to find the owner of this perky piece of underwear. He rents a small room in Baku and begins his quest to find his “Cinderella”.

Once Upon a Time in Shanghai

Welcome to Shanghai. No, not the Chinese megalopolis full of neon and nouveaux riches, but precisely the opposite: an eponymous slum in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. In the distance, skyscrapers built with oil money tower above the city, but here dilapidated houses are packed along a single railway line. The slum is scheduled for demolition, and now and again a child is killed by one of the freight trains slowly chugging by. When the German director Veit Helmer arrives in Shanghai to make a feature film, feelings quickly run high. The locals are afraid that he wants to make them look ridiculous. The young Azerbaijani filmmaker Leyli Gafarova succeeds however in gaining the inhabitants’ trust and films a choppy, playful portrait of Shanghai in the margins of the feature film production. In the guise of a making-of, she shows intimate fragments of life in the slum, while it’s still standing.

Baikonur

“Whatever falls from heaven, you may keep.” So goes the unwritten law of the Kazakh steppes. A law avidly adhered to by the inhabitants of a small village, who collect the space debris that falls downrange from the nearby Baikonur space station. The last two youthful members of the village are the radio operator Iskander, known as Gagarin, and the spirited Nazira. While Nazira finds it increasing difficult to conceal her love for Iskander by means of her unconventional behaviour, Iskander is evidently not only crazy about Baikonur and the vastness of outer space, but also deeply smitten with the beautiful French astronaut Julie Mahé, whose journey to the stars he wistfully follows on television.

Absurdistan

An allegorical comedy centered on two childhood sweethearts who seem destined for one another until the women of their isolated village, angered by male indifference toward the water shortage, go on a sex strike that threatens the young couple's first night of love.

Tuvalu

Set in a dilapidated indoor swimming pool (the Central Baths in Sofia), the film details the efforts of Anton, a clueless dreamer who yearns to sail the world, and Martha, the button obsessed cashier, to maintain the illusion for Anton's blind father that business is thriving. Working to sabotage their efforts is Gregor - Anton's brother - an amoral developer who is determined to raze the entire town and construct a sprawling condominium complex. Gregor engineers an accident that seems certain to doom the business and in the process steals away Eva, the beautiful woman of Anton's dreams. Will Gregor's dastardly plan succeed?

A Trick of the Light

A rare gem of cinematic storytelling that weaves docudrama, fictional reenactment, and experimental photography into a powerful, reflective work on the early days of German cinema. The film tells the story of the Skladanowsky Brothers, the German-born duo responsible for inventing the "bioskop", an early version of the film projector.