What Shall We Do Without Death

A portrait of five St. Petersburgians and their connection to The Hermitage.

It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he partly glorifies but which still also haunts him. Franzi immerses herself in this world by looking at an abundance of beguiling yet disturbing photographs taken at the time by her father. Her own childish fantasy realm of fairy tales and picture books soon intermingle with nightmares as reality merges with imagination, war, horror and beauty.

Blue Distance is set in a train compartment. An androgynous woman thinks of letters a lady wrote to a gentleman about the necessity of separation and the desire for a casual encounter in the future. Another woman, a mirror image of the first, disrupts her reverie. After she leaves it is unknown whether the first woman's wish was about the man with whom an encounter will never take place or about the woman with whom it has just happened.

A woman reflects on her romantic relationship with a young moroccan years ago. Her daughter travels to Morocco, attempting to relive her mother's past.

Documentary about Austrian city Judenburg and its art scene.

Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life.

A young woman in New York.

Wanda is a dominatrix who runs a gallery in a building on the Hamburg waterfront, where audiences pay for the privilege of watching her humiliate her slaves. She is a business woman who smashes sexual stereotypes and social taboos with icy self-possession and an enigmatic smile. As artist she specializes in the staging of elaborate BDSM fantasies and her affairs transgress the usual boundaries of personal and professional life. Along the way she leaves her German lesbian lover, a shoe fetishist, for an American "trainee," and does more than step on the toes of the male performer who has broken the rules of the master-slave relationship by falling in love with her.

A German short film