Manchmal möchte man fliegen

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

September 1927 •German

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony

February 2008 •German

Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.

Berlin Utopiekadaver

April 2024 •German

A taxi drives through the city of Berlin. Its driver is a punk, left and a well-known figure in the autonomous scene. The stations of his trip are the most important places of the autonomous scene: all in the struggle for survival. The last evictions have not yet been processed and the next ones are coming right up.

Prinzessinnenbad

May 2007 •English

A film about three teenagers - Klara, Mina and Tanutscha - from the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. The trio have known each other since Kindergarten and have plenty in common. The three 15-year-olds are the best of friends; they are spending the summer at Prinzenbad, a large open-air swimming pool at the heart of the district where they live. They're feeling pretty grown up, and are convinced they've now left their childhood behind.

Queens Don’t Cry

February 2002 •German

Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany’s most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists – in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.

Criminal Minded: Live at the Crime Scene

December 2019 •German

I Don’t Want to Be Just a Memory

February 2024 •German

Berlin queer community members mourn the substance abuse-related loss of their friends by sharing memories and rituals. Resembling glow-in-the-dark fungi, they radiate light together as a network of support and care.

Berlinized

April 2012 •English

The documentary BERLINIZED describes this very Berlin-specific attitude in a reflection on and a journey to mid-1990s' Berlin. Filmmaker Lucian Busse, an active protagonist of the period, documents the transformation of Berlin after the Wall. But Berlinized represents more than just the 1990s - it is a metaphor for this virally catching creative feeling, the slightly rough directness, spiced up with a big dash of typical Berlin humor. Berlinized lets the former protagonists reflect how that temporary feeling of freedom shaped their individual lives, and to what degree that freedom can still be found among the neat order of today's Berlin. These reflections are as diverse as the interviewees and as multifaceted as the changes in those times.

Julia

August 2013 •German

Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.

plant portals: breath

August 2020 •English

"plant portals: breath" is an experimental meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry daily, connecting bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes and the complicated concept of "rest" to ask: Can nature heal us? Shot entirely on an iPhone, the film is intentional in imagining what is possible, and manifests a reality rooted in mindfulness.“

KitKatClub - Das Leben ist ein Zirkus

Invalid date •German

The story of the legendary Berlin club and its founder, a woman whose life is inextricably interwoven with the bright and dark sides of a hedonistic lifestyle.

The Wall

November 1962 •English

Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.

Der verborgene Schatz - Die legendäre Kunstsammlung des Iran

February 2017 •German

Ich will da sein - Jenny Gröllmann

June 2008 •German

Opa sein Berlin

January 1981 •German

Rare documentary footage from around 1900 depicts the mood of life in Berlin at the turn of the century.

Berlin - Hauptstadt der DDR I

January 1970 •German

A portrait of East Berlin

My Film with Andrei, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Document a Sex Party.

November 2021 •English

A crypto-trader and an ex-clergyman travel to Berlin to throw a sex party. Filmmaker Ayoto Ataraxia documents them and their sex-positive community with a phone during the week leading up to the event, discussing sex and life. But will they cum?

DJ Punk: The Photographer Daniel Josefsohn

November 2018 •German

Nobody captured the atmosphere of 1990s Berlin better than German photographer Daniel Josefsohn, who died in 2016 at the age of 54, leaving his mark in advertising with his irreverent aesthetic and punk sensibility. It was his spontaneous, imperfect images shot for an MTV campaign in 1994 that first made him famous.

Berg

April 2012 •English

BERG investigates a historical site through an alternate shift between documentary and fictional representation. A soundscape produced from samples from a series of mainstream Spy Movies overlaps a selection of classic shots, inspired by the most repetitive cinematic clichés that are to be found in the espionage genre.

RING

September 2018 •

Ring is an experimental 16mm short film. It is composed by 20 shots of 30 seconds each, of landscapes and situations following the 35,7 km of the Berlin S-Bahn Ring. An hypnotic flow of fixed shots will transform the experience of observation of the journey only through the internal rhythm, textures and composition of the shots, and where the main subject matter will be time and the present as a symbol of itself.