- Activism
- Animation
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- Black Germans
- Childhood
- Cologne
- Colonialism
- Comedy
- DDR
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- East/West Germany
- Environment
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- Short films
- Stuttgart
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Oma & Bella
Oma and Bella is an intimate glimpse into the life of two dynamic elderly Jewish women in Berlin. The film follows them as make elaborate dishes recalled from their childhoods, before the Holocaust. Through the cooking of the sumptuous meals, they retain a part of their past past while remaining very much engaged in the present.
Jacob the Liar
A Jewish ghetto in central Europe, 1944. By coincidence, Jakob Heym eavesdrops on a German radio broadcast announcing the Soviet Army is making slow by steady progress towards central Europe. In order to keep his companion in misfortune, Mischa, from risking his life for a few potatoes, he tells him what he heard and announces that he is in possession of a radio - in the ghetto a crime punishable by death. It doesn't take long for word of Jakob's secret to spread - suddenly, there is new hope and something to live for - and so Jakob finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to come up with more and more stories.
Jalda und Anna: Erste Generation danach
Jalda Rebling and Anna Adam share many things. Not only that they both live together in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin and that they both decided to express their lives in art. What unites the two much more is the fact that they are daughters whose mothers each survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz. And this aspect of the past can be found in many facets of their lives today. The film accompanies the cheerful ladies as it shows how they use their work as artists to reflect on and comment on the events of the past. Anna’s art projects such as the “happy hippie jew bus” are just as much a part of this as Jalda’s work as a musician in a medieval Jewish music style band and her work as a member of the Concervatice Yeshiva University in Jerusalem.
Spielzeugland
A German mother lies to her son about where the Nazis are sending their Jewish neighbors. Good filmmakers don’t need a feature to make powerful movies. “Toyland” is a film that works so brilliantly that it managed to be powerful, thought-provoking and even gut-wrenching than most Hollywood films that are eight to ten times longer. With sparse dialogue, director Jochen Alexander Freydank keeps us hooked throughout this superb short film.
Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann
Only two Jews who were born in the town of Czernowitz still survive, after the turmoils of the twentieth century, and they are now both in their nineties.
Ein deutsches Leben
Brunhilde Pomsel describes herself as an “apolitical girl” and a “figure on the margins,” but she got closer to one of the worst criminals in world history than anyone else left alive. Today aged 104, Pomsel served as Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ stenographer. Brunhilde Pomsel’s life mirrors all the major breaks and continuities of the 20th century.
Facing Arthur
Arthur Lederman is 100 years old. Before World War II, he was a renowned concert violinist in his native Poland. In 1938, he escaped via steamship to New York City and was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Christoph Erbsloeh is a 20-year-old German cellist whose grandfather served in Hitler’s army. But when a Jewish aid agency sends the young exchange student to help the elderly recluse, Arthur and Christoph both begin to confront the legacy of Nazi Germany in ways neither had ever imagined.
Die Mörder sind unter uns
After returning from a concentration camp, Susanne finds an ex-soldier living in her apartment. Together the two try to move past their experiences during WWII. A biographical portrayal of Simon Wiesenthal, famous Nazi Hunter. From his imprisonment in a Nazi Concentration Camp, the film follows his liberation and his rise to become one of the leading Nazi hunters in the world, bringing such criminals to justice as Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie.
Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger
Landscapes of Memory – The Life of Ruth Klüger is a biopic about the high profile author Ruth Klüger, a famous scholar of German literature. Her autobiography Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered is an international bestseller and the book’s publication in 12 languages has garnered multiple awards for Klüger. It is one thing to survive the Holocaust, but quite another to deal with the lasting impact of this experience. This filmic portrait of Ruth Klüger, an American literary scholar from Vienna, deals with these issues by revisiting four significant places in her life: Vienna, California, Göttingen, and Israel. Ruth Klüger also shares her thoughts on very personal topics: her childhood in anti-Jewish Vienna, her life in the States, her motherhood of two American sons, and the culture of commemoration.