5rFilmproduktion

Germany 2021, 88 min
by Christian Bäucker

In his film HEIMATKUNDE, the director returns to the school building of his childhood in East Germany. For almost 25 years it lay empty, seemingly waiting to be revived. The remains of socialist education are pasted over, hidden, forgotten.In tentative interviews with contemporary witnesses we are gradually coming nearer to the systematic manipulation of the child’s mind. In this way, it becomes understandable how the dictatorship functioned and turned into the commonplace “that’s just the way it is”, which still exists today and thwarts any criticism of and debate about history.However, overcoming the German “duality” remains impossible without looking back and reappraising this form of education that generated the authoritarian mind.

Germany 2010
by Jorge Pavez Jímenez

The material of Vidas Mínimas was shot at the turn of the millennium in a refugee center near Berlin (Hennigsdorf). Ten years later, the film can finally be released without causing harm to the protagonists. Mirela, Uwe, Domingo, and Nicolás come from Colombia and Cuba. They experience limbo. All of them wait years on end for some kind of result, unsure whether it will be integration or deportation. Each person reveals a different story of persecution, marginalization and violence. The film does not invent "brave" asylum seekers, content with what little FRG offers them. Nor does it portray the characters as victims of their own history. Rather, it focuses on the survival strategies that the asylum seekers implement in order to remain in the home without feeling completely imprisoned. The director and cinematographer, also of Latin American descent, in his "minimal" days in the home, investigated the illegal work community of Berlin, including metal shops, cleaning services, and brothels. The result is an introspective look into immigration in Europe.

Germany 2010, 9 min
by Anja Strelets

Natascha lives in Uniza, 8 years she is. Most of the windows of the house, where she lives, are nailed shut, except for one room with four iron beds, a chest of drawers and many cardboard boxes. One of these boxes keeps Natasha's clothes. Just now she put on her prettiest dress. Open minded she is, chats away frankly and unintentionally. But what she says affects you in an unexpected way. Natascha is an experimental documentary, slowly evolving the portrait of a girl, who lives in one of the most desolate parts of Russia.