„I began documenting their lives, if only because I hoped each film would have a happy ending.“ (Gerd Kroske)
Stream
Social & External
The “Bowlingtreff” is a bowling alley situated right in the centre of Leipzig opened in July 1987. At that time the quality of life in Leipzig and the whole GDR got worse. Houses collapsed because of poor conditions, public life and amusement was on a very low level. The “Bowlingtreff” was not merely an urban entertainment centre but a revolution in those days. Built with the help of hundreds of volunteers without permission of the state authorities in Berlin the building expresses a free and international architecture known as postmodernism. It is an architecture that was never seen before in Leipzig. Marble and parquet on the floor, a glass roof and beautiful pink pillars. The atmosphere was western as time witnesses remember it.
This documentary gives a voice to organizers, DJs and party guests. Through their memories and confessions as well as unpublished videos and photos 20 years of history come back to life.
At Hotel Astoria, the former hotspot of Leipzig, guests were served champagne and turtle soup while the Stasi listened in. Animated memories from times gone by.
A documentary about the hooligans and the rivalry of two football clubs in Leipzig.
Gisela involuntarily ends up studying in the cosmopolitan city of Chemnitz. There she meets her friends Jana, Fred and Meryam, with whom she spends her nights out, fights with Nazis, eventually founds the band Superbusen and, through music, hopes to find answers to all the problems life throws at her.
Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One job is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.
Andreas Dresen's adaptation of Clemens Meyer's novel about a group of East German friends right after the fall of the Wall.
A dream becomes a nightmare: Shortly after the Iranian doctor Murath Tehrani and his German wife Claudia moved into a chic villa on the outskirts of Leipzig, threatening couple flutter into the house and Claudia is harassed by anonymous callers with xenophobic slogans. First, the woman tries to hide the threat from her husband. But not even the police can help her. Suddenly, every stranger approaching the house appears as a threat. Psychological pressure is also increasing the pressure on the harmonious marriage of the young couple. But Murath and Claudia are unwilling to be driven out of their homes by aggressive racists.
The two computer specialists Frank and Kamminke are not the type of citizens the party likes. Thus they are sent to the landscape where they still find enough stuff to do: They repair the software of a western type factory which is currently not working.
The pakistani hairdresser, Haroon, has immigrated illegally to Germany, the German in- surance broker, Mark, dreams of emigrating. The consequences of a car accident throw these two entirely different people together for one night. At the end of an odyssey through the alien world of illegality, they both discover that something bonds them: a desire to be far away...
A young woman finds herself in a decaying world from which there is just one escape ...
The Congolese Sikumoya faces prejudice and racism on a regular basis. He's accused of not adapting enough to the "German culture" and tries harder. A Neo-Nazi group and his mother-in-law push him to the breaking point. While in a coma, his metamorphosis completes.
Anne, a twenty-something student, enjoys a slow, summery day in Leipzig. While strolling through her neighbourhood she has several encounters with a stranger. At the end of the day she can't help but ask: "Do I know you?"
Franziska Naumann happily greets her allegedly new neighbor Dr. Gottfried Naumann. She is very surprised when he wants to move into the same apartment in which just the movers carry their furniture. Even Gottfried is surprised - Franziska has not only the same name as he, but apparently also rented the same apartment. Without compromising, the quarreled estate agents Beate and Werner Wüstholtz has rented the apartment twice. There is only one solution: until the circumstances are clarified, the unequal couple must live together in the apartment. The fight burns.
"Never Again?" seeks to educate others on the horrors and consequences of anti-Semitism. The film follows the journey of a Holocaust Survivor and former radical Islamist as they seek to leave behind a legacy of love over hate.
Actor Mark Bonnar is on a mission to understand more about the Scottish new towns in which he grew up, exploring the street sculpture made by artists such as his dad in the 60s, 70s and 80s. He discovers why the new towns are there and how they enticed people out of the bigger cities, and uncovers the surprising ways in which public art changed the new towns and the new towns changed public art. Mark's father, Stan, made sculptures that stand to this day on the streets of Glenrothes, East Kilbride and the Scottish new town that never was, Stonehouse. These new towns employed town artists to make artworks in the very housing precincts the new residents were moving into.
The film was commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization founded by Dennis Puleston and others, to raise public awareness of dangers inherent in the way we were responding to the environment a half-century ago.
