Zwickel auf Bizyckel

Feature film.

Artificial Intelligence is already changing almost every area of life today. This documentary essay is inspired by the changes that influence our perception of Topos. By combining film images, graphics with documentary text modules, the author associatively points out how the progress of data and technology colonizes human existence and fundamentally influences the balance between the psychological, mental, and biological aspects of life.

They meet in Jugoslavia. Katharina, daughter of a Jugoslavian immigrant worker, has grown up in the Federal Republic of Germany. She is a confident, energetic career woman who has managed to work her way up to become a succesful television journalist. She goes to visit her parent's country, to do a story about the children of immigrant workers in their home country. Although she says she doesn´t need a "home" any more, even she feels strange in her own country. Peter is a rather "untypical" sort of man: a dreamer, a thinker. He has given up his steady job as a composer for advertising films and is divorced. He goes to Jugoslavia to find something out about the past. He travels to the places where his father was stationed during the Second World War.

Between 1976 and 1982 thousands of citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in Argentina. How do Argentinians cope with this tragedy? How do they elaborate their recent past?

A young father takes his son on a journey away from Buenos Aires and through the strange and wondrous world of rural South America. The man is unemployed and separated from the boy's mother. The trip teaches the man to rediscover both the world outside urban Argentina, and also to rediscover his son.

In 1970, Melek Tez came to Berlin as a young worker from Turkey. A confident woman, she first countered racist resentments and remarks with irony and wit. Jokingly, she even referred to herself as a "Kümmeltürkin", a derogatory German term for Turkish migrants. Yet after fourteen humiliating years, her fighting spirit has given way to resignation: Melek Tez is returning to Turkey. Blending documentary, interviews and re-enacted scenes, director Jeanine Meerapfel chronicles Melek Tez' life experience.

It’s the late 1950s, and in an affluent and quietly respectable part of Buenos Aires, young Sulamit Löwenstein strikes up a friendship with her next-door neighbour Friedrich over the whereabouts of her family dog. She is the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to Argentina, he is the son of a senior SS officer, a tragic political legacy from whose shadow both characters struggle to escape over the next three decades. Following the teenaged Friedrich to Germany, Sulamit finds him caught up in the radical politics of late-1960s student life; and she’s forced to make important decisions about her attitude to her homeland when Friedrich returns to Argentina to join the fight against the military junta.

Documentary by Jeanine Meerapfel.

Since childhood, Raquel and Maria have been close friends. Now all grown-up, Raquel has fulfilled her dream of becoming an actress, while Maria has married a handyman, given birth to three children and runs the family household. In the wake of the Argentine military coup of 1976, Maria's oldest son Carlos is abducted. Desperate, Maria turns to her prominent friend for help. Yet the more Raquel gets involved in the search for Carlos, the more she becomes herself a target of the junta. Finally, she flees from Argentina to Berlin. Meanwhile Maria joins a group of women who investigate the fate of their disappeared relatives. In 1983, after the fall of the dictatorship, the two friends meet again.

Two life stories. That of Malou, a French woman, married to a German Jew, a refugee stranded in South America: a picture of the pre-war generation reflected in the unusual destiny of an individual woman. And that of Hannah, an alert, independent, modern woman, seeking after freedom and her own identity, and trying in present-day Berlin to save her shaky marriage.

Short film about language

Essay film about forests, inspired by a short piece of Robert Walser.

Abstract feature film.

Short film about language

Essay film about forests, inspired by a short piece of Robert Walser.

Abstract feature film.

Documentary film.

Documentary about a small German village and its inhabitants four decades after the last remaining jewish inhabitants were chased away or put into concentration camps. Interviews with the people of the village about the past as well as with the exiled jewish community, now living in New York.

Documentary film.