Bavaria Film International

Germany 2009
by Ciro Cappellari, Michael Ballhaus

By accompanying 20 very different individuals in today's Berlin, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and filmmaker Ciro Cappellari sketch a portrait of a modern, stimulating metropolis. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who transposed the visions of Fassbinder, Scorsese into unforgettable images, returned to Berlin from Hollywood - and didn't recognize his native city. Together with DoP colleague Ciro Cappellari, he rediscovers his hometown, 20 years after the fall of the Wall. The result is a lyri

Germany 2005, 90 min
by Fatih Akin

A European musician and composer sets out to capture the musical diversity of Istanbul. A lover of experimenting with sound, Alexander Hacke (of the German avantgarde band Einstürzende Neubauten) roams the streets of Istanbul with his mobile recording studio and "magic mike" to assemble an inspired portrait of Turkish music. His voyage leads to the discovery of a broad spectrum ranging from modern electronic, rock and hip-hop to classical "Arabesque". As he wanders through this seductive world,

Germany 2009, 96 min
by Hans-Christian Schmid

Behind the fluffy towels and crisp white sheets of Berlin's finest hotels belies a tale of brilliant entrepreneurship: A company takes the dirty laundry of the German hotels to Poland and brings it back clean the very next day. Outside of Germany, labour is cheaper and regulations are less constricting. But farbeyond this fascinating capital venture remains the harsh realityof everyday life of the hard-working Polish workers, throughwhose hands the white sheets pass. While Beata struggles torais

Germany 2005, 167 min
by Philip Gröning

Silence at the movies pays, and that profound and engrossing variety of German documentary Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille), by Philip Groening (who produced the film with Bavaria Film and Swiss company Ventura Films), won the hearts of jury members of the World Cinema Documentary Section at the Sundance Festival, who bestowed upon it a Special Jury Prize.(Camillo De Marco / Cineuropa)Deep in the French Alps lies La Grande Chartreuse, one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries. In 1984, t