Tom Vogt
The world-famous Mahendra Highway runs 1024 km across Nepal, along primeval forests and mountain deserts, through hot tropical regions and past the icy peaks of the Himalayas. Natural wonders line up with cultural sites, places of pilgrimage with vibrant bazaars, Buddhist with Hindu sanctuaries
Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world and yet magical and mystical. On the Mahendra Highway, the trade route from east to west, the documentary series leads across the Himalayan country with the highest mountains in the world.
Both a visit to a very peculiar exhibition at the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany, as well as an unprejudiced look at the artistic depiction of violence throughout history and the ways in which that depiction has been gendered.
"Puss Riot and other sins" - The Putin system is taking on more and more features of the Soviet system. The big fear and paranoia returns.
More of a film essay - of the type pioneered by Orson Welles and Chris Marker - than a standard documentary, German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck's The Net: The Unabomber, the LSD and the Internet begins with the typical format and structure of a nonfiction film, and a single subject (the life and times of mail bomber Ted Kaczynski). From that thematic springboard, Dammbeck branches out omnidirectionally, segueing into a series of thematic riffs and variants on such marginally-related subjects as: the history of cyberspace, terrorism, utopian ideals, LSD, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.
Shot in a neo-expressionist style, the film is a satire on cults of any kind. The plot follows Frankie and Hannes, a young gay couple living in Berlin. One is studying art and the other medicine. Their happy life is disrupted when Frankie attends a lecture and quickly becomes involved in a sinister cult operating as a self-help group called “Optimal Optimism”. Madame C, a former Nazi party member, is the leader of Optimal Optimism. When the cult members discovers that Frankie is gay, he is repeatedly raped by both men and women of the group. Hannes must find a way to rescue him.
