A documentary exploring a crime that shocked Germany in the summer of 1999.
Social & External
The film recounts the life of the prisoners and the problems their families encounter in their struggle to survive. Here again filmmaker Kamran Shirdel employs the cinema verité style. The interviews with the prisoners, social workers and teachers serve as commentaries for "constructed" documentary images.
Thirty years after the Cold War ends, a former political prisoner of the East German secret police searches for the truth after learning his brother spied on him for the regime, and discovers the lasting effects of living in a surveillance state.
Ashley Smith was a troubled 19-year-old when she choked herself to death at Ontario's Grand Valley Institution for Women. Her death made national headlines and led to a scathing report by Canada’s federal prison ombudsman. Incarceration for Ashley began at a youth detention centre in New Brunswick. Her crime: she had tossed crabapples at a mailman. Her one-month sentence stretched to almost four years, served in five provinces. With the prison videotapes and exclusive access to Smith’s parents, along with a fellow inmate, this documentary exposes a system that fails the many Ashley Smiths still incarcerated in Canadian institutions.
Tells the story of punk in the GDR.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.
The soulless atmosphere of a women's penitentiary destroys the prisoners' personality, kills all femininity in them. The film looks at the rationality of the long prison terms for women with children.
During the 16th Workers' Festival in Dresden in 1976, a student group of Chilean emigrants paints a mural symbolically depicting the activity of the Unidad Popular during Salvador Allende's reign. Festival guests comment on this work. Music by Chilean music group Jaspampa, formed in Leipzig in 1972.
Dragan Wende has lived in Berlin since the '70s and has seen the city change through the years. His nephew comes to live with him as Dragan remembers the better days he lived as a Yugoslavian immigrant in a divided city.
In February 1986 they received the call of a fatherland that no longer exists: four young GDR citizens on the verge of adulthood see themselves forced, like so many others in East and West Germany, to do their one and a half years of military service. What is special: Their service area is the border system, an anti-imperialist protective wall according to their superiors, death strips and prison bars for a population incapacitated in naked reality. Now, seventeen years later, there is a reunion with the comrades and the old post. This feature film, which was the first in reunified Germany to deal with the inner workings of the GDR border troops, tells of life on the fence, the associated contradictions and some hot phases in the Cold War.
It was a foundational myth of the GDR that it was anti-fascist and free of Nazis. But was that really the case? The film takes a critical look on the actual way the brown heritage was dealt with in the GDR.
Berlin, summer 1988: While Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd perform in the West, East Berliners can look forward to Bruce Springsteen, Depeche Mode and James Brown. The documentary reveals how the organizers enforced the concerts with the state authorities. On the anniversary of the fall of the Wall.
Over the past hundred years, dramatic social upheavals have taken place in the name of Karl Marx's theories. In Western Europe, the student movement of 1968 and the Eurocommunists were inspired. And in recent times, the thinker has experienced a renaissance.
"Busch singt" consists of 6 films "About the first part of our century" and does not present Ernst Busch only as a singer but is a film with and about Busch as a chronicler and fighter for communist ideals of his time. Konrad Wolf died during the production, he directed part 3 "1935 oder Das Faß der Pandora" and part 5 "Ein Toter auf Urlaub".
The film follows a simple structure, and shows the drug-related degradation of five youths (Jake, Tracey, Jessica, Alice, Oreo) during the course of three years. The film depicts drug-related crimes and diseases: prostitution, male prostitution, AIDS, and lethal overdoses.
Marcel Ophüls interviews various important Eastern European figures for their thoughts on the reunification of Germany and the fall of Communism.
2024 is likely to be a decisive year for Sahra Wagenknecht's political future. In the arena of power, she might assume a role that she is already very familiar with. In the early years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sahra Wagenknecht became the "most famous face" of the PDS, the successor party to the SED. Yet, even as the youngest member of the party's executive board, she was considered a "disruptive factor." She is unyielding and swims against the tide. Sahra Wagenknecht does not distance herself from Stalinism, nor from the Berlin Wall, and wishes for a reformed GDR.
A short documentary from 1975 about two women serving 25 years in a Missouri penitentiary. Made with an all-female crew.
Maryam Henderson-Uloho spent thirteen years in prison in Louisiana, seven in solitary confinement. After her release she struggled to find housing or employment. She began selling secondhand goods out of a suitcase on a street corner in New Orleans. In just three years, she grew her business to a brick-and-mortar thrift store—one that also provides housing and employment for other formerly-incarcerated women. She calls those women—and her store—Sister Hearts.
