A Happy Family Life

A miniseries about a pair of teenagers living in a slum at the fringes of Berlin. Alcoholism, prostitution, and violence are just a few of the themes of the three movies.

Horst Wolland is a welder in Berlin who tries to move up the career ladder to better provide for his family. He is on the verge of being promoted when the working conditions worsen, triggering a strike. Wolland stays out of it, but he also refuses to tell his manager who the strike leader is, so he is not promoted. Wolland understands what solidarity means and tries to organize another strike.

The relationship of a married couple in their 40s is broken when the mother has an affair with her teenage daughter's boyfriend.

Documentary film.

The title describes the state of Berlin, which was a construction site for years after the fall of the wall, celebrating itself as it became something that could not yet be named. A city - full of history - in the future. Kratisch and Sartory observed the building project of Berlin for a period of nine years.

Horst Wolland is a welder in Berlin who tries to move up the career ladder to better provide for his family. He is on the verge of being promoted when the working conditions worsen, triggering a strike. Wolland stays out of it, but he also refuses to tell his manager who the strike leader is, so he is not promoted. Wolland understands what solidarity means and tries to organize another strike.

HARUN FAROCKI – TAKE TWO combines two perspectives on filmmaker Harun Farocki. For his TV documentary “Die Sache mit der Realität. Eine Collage über Dokumentarfilm” (1996), Lothar Schuster had a long conversation with Farocki, whom he had known since the late 1960s. Farocki discusses the idea of the Enlightenment, the compositional patterns of his films, the relationship between image and text. Ingo Kratisch, responsible for the camera in many of Farocki’s films between 1977 and his death, used his photo and film camera to record casual observations during the shooting of “The Creators of Shopping Worlds”(2001), “In Comparison”(2009), “Serious Games”(2009/10) and other films. In HARUN FAROCKI – TAKE TWO, Schuster’s and Kratisch’s footage alternates; discourse and observation comment and complement each other. On the one hand the gradual construction of thoughts during speech, on the other the act of patiently waiting, making pauses and preparing to shoot.