Der Tunnel

Shot in the style of a legal thriller, the documentary "The International Criminal Court" relates how the first internationally legitimated criminal court was founded in 2002, and how it investigates appalling crimes committed by some of the world's most ruthless war criminals.

In times of rampant populism and increasing distrust of the elite, the filmmaker accompanies the 81-year-old founder of the controversial World Economic Forum over the period of one year in his efforts to implement his leitmotif: to improve the state of the world. Can the WEF contribute to solving global problems? Or is it rather an integral part of the problem?

This is the story of Ahmed Khatib, a Palestinian boy shot by Israeli soldiers. His father decides to donate his son's organs to Israeli children as a gesture of peace. A powerful documentary on Israel's people, who have learned to live with everyday conflict, but have not given up their hope for peace.

Derek and Nancy Haysom were brutally murdered in their house in Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. Suspicion fell on their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend Jens Söring. They flee to Europe, but are caught and extradited to the U.S. Elizabeth is sentenced to 90 years in jail for incitement to murder, Jens Söring to two life sentences. Karin Steinberger, Marcus Vetter and their team spent over three years researching this case, which achieved world-wide notoriety. They uncovered new evidence, including the fact none of the blood samples found at the scene of the crime belonged to Jens Söring.

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

MARTIN ARMSTRONG, once a US based trillion dollar financial adviser, used the number pi to predict economic turning points with precision. When some big New York bankers asked him to join the club to help them to take over Russia, he refused to join the manipulation. A few days later the FBI stormed his offices accusing him of a 3 billion dollar Ponzi Scheme - an attempt to stop him talking about the real Ponzi Scheme of debts that the US has build up over the years and which he thinks starts to collapse after October 1, 2015, a mayor pi turning point he is predicting.

Cinema Jenin follows an ambitious initiative to re-open a previously abandoned cinema in the West Bank city of Jenin. Founded in the 1960s, it was once the largest cinema in Palestine, today it stands as a hollow echo of its society. Re-building the cinema, Germans and Palestinians come together evoking often comedic but always political and cultural ramifacations. Cinema Jenin witnessed an intimate, nuanced and textured view into the city and its domestic affairs as well as the journey of a dedicated, loyal, often conflicted group of people who hope that the re-building of the cinema will be a bridge to peace, freedom and Palestinian self-empowerment.

The German filmmaker Marcus Attila Vetter has a Turkish father, Cahit Cubuk, and he goes to visit him for the first time in this documentary. He travels to the Anatolian village of Cubuk Koye, where his 72-year-old father lives with his wife and two daughters. A film crew that got there ahead of him interviews the hopeful father, who wonders what his son will be like. "If he's anything like me, he'll be warm-hearted. If he's more like his mother, the prospects are not very good." Marcus films the Turkish landscape and talks with his newly found family, who all cry many tears. Marcus's father feels that he had no choice back then but to leave Germany, and his halfsisters explain how much they missed their father when he was away. In the meantime, we hear passages read in voice-over from the diary of Marcus's mother Gerlinde, from the time that she was with Cahit - how they met, fell in love and ultimately broke up.