Joachim Hellwig

DEFA documentary in honor of the 750th birthday of the city of Berlin.

A retro '70s vision of the future, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS was made by the DEFA film studio. A radio signal attracts a team of astronauts to a mysterious planet. Once there, they are warmly welcomed by an alien race, but are soon suspicious of what is really occurring on this strange land.

5.3/10

east german documentary about the world of tomorrow.

A documentary dedicated to the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students held in East Berlin in the summer of 1973.

6.4/10

A defa futurum short film.

The futuristically trendy moderator Chris Wallasch leads the viewer through this program exploring what love might look like in 2002. Passengers at the Berlin-Schönefeld airport are questioned about how they imagine life in thirty years. These interviews are surrounded by a clever and colorful potpourri of flashbacks and flashforwards dealing with the timeless issues of relationships and family.

A cinema-verité documentary of Ghana’s five years of independence under President Kwame Nkruma. Striking color images of Africans in modern-day jobs, such as airline pilot and construction worker, predominate, with little voice-over.

The film documents the well-known story of Anne Frank, whose family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Eventually caught, Frank was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she later died. The film goes on to explore the concentration camp in detail, the procedures and methods of the camp's commanding officers, and the atrocities the Nazis committed. Shockingly, many of the officers went on to retain their freedom, and lead relatively normal lives, often receiving support from the German government.