Cinephil

Germany 2014, 156 min
by Wim Wenders, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Robert Redford, Margreth Olin, Karim Aïnouz

'If buildings could talk, what would they say about us?' Cathedrals of Culture offers six startling responses to this question. This 3D film project about the soul of buildings allows six iconic and very different buildings to speak for themselves, examining human life from the unblinking perspective of a manmade structure. Six acclaimed filmmakers bring their own visual style and artistic approach to the project. Buildings, they show us, are material manifestations of human thought and action:

Germany 2013, 90 min
by Alexander Gentelev

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia will be the first ever to be held in a subtropical resort. The most expensive games ever break all records when it comes to corruption and megalomania. Putin's administration has everyone at its beck and call, from oligarchs down to the ordinary people who have to pay the Olympic bill. Both the powerful and the weak speak out in this investigative documentary, which unveils the hidden story behind Putin's games. Government critic Garry Kasparov says that

Australia, Mongolia, Germany 2024, 96 min
by Gabrielle Brady

A young couple must adapt to a new way of life after a devastating storm wrought by climate change forces them from their home.It is spring in the desert of Bayanhongor province in Mongolia, where young nomadic couple Davaa and Zaya live with their four kids, caring for their birthing animals.The kids spend the nights telling each other ghost stories of disappearing gers. Davaa awakes startled to check the herd for wolves, but finds nothing there. Local herders discuss the auspicious sighting of

Germany 2023, 97 min
by Jialing Zhang

China is in the process of establishing a dictatorship based on Big Data. The film accompanies people who are fighting against an all-controlling surveillance system and in danger of being crushed by it. Thanks to exclusive and intimate access, this long-term observation shows the lives of several activists fighting for human rights, who live under extreme surveillance and traumatisation. At the same time, the film's scope broadens to include ordinary citizens whose daily behaviour is registered

Germany, USA 2023, 92 min
by Ibrahim Nash’at

When the United States withdrew from its twenty-year 'forever war' in Afghanistan, the Taliban retook control of the ravaged country and immediately found an American base loaded with weaponry—a portion of the over $7 billion in U.S. armaments still in the country. Unprecedented and audacious, director Ibrahim Nash’at’s HOLLYWOODGATE spends a year inside Afghanistan following the Taliban as they take possession of the cache America left behind—and transform from a fundamentalist militia into a h

Germany, Mexico 2020, 112 min
by Ai Weiwei

Vivos is a documentary feature film by artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei, portraying the human impact of Mexico’s ongoing crisis of enforced disappearances.On the night of September 26, 2014, a convoy of students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in drug cartel-afflicted Guerrero state, travelling in buses in the city of Iguala, were brutally attacked by police forces and other masked assailants. In the course of the night, six people were killed, dozens more were wounded, and 43 students wer

Germany 2019, 73 min
by Sylvia Nagel, Sonya Winterberg

The untold story of the women of Block 10. Some 70 years ago, gynecologist Carl Clauberg conducted sterilization experiments in Auschwitz on women and girls. Were German companies involved in these crimes? Most of the few women that survived became sterile, only some could later still bear children. Clauberg's cruel research on birth control and infertility is part of the medical canon to this day. Meet the last survivors of the infamous Block 10 who speak candidly about their experience and how

Germany, Brasil 2018, 88 min
by Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

When you post something on the web, can you be sure it stays there? Enter a hidden shadow industry of digital cleaning where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn’t like.. violence, pornography and.. political content. Who is controlling what we see and what we think?

Italy, Germany 2018, 80 min
by Francesca Mannocchi, Alessio Romenzi

In wars it is not uncommon for the defeated to bury their weapons before retreating, hiding arsenals waiting for better times. The weapons that Isis has left in inheritance for the future are hundreds of thousands of children educated in violence and martyrdom. In Isis’s ideology children are the most effective weapon to bring into the future the idea of a great universal Caliphate: successors of one goal, creating a world divided in half, on the one the Jihadists and on the other the infidels t

2017, 90 min
by Duki Dror

The documentary brings the viewer deep into the intimate and personal experiences of former Mossad agents and uncovers the personal truths that lie behind the myth of the Israeli Mossad. When speaking of the Israeli Mossad, one of the most esteemed intelligence agencies in the world, it is near impossible to separate fact from fiction, to understand where the mythology that surrounds the Mossad ends and the real story begins. As the film exposes the personal experiences of the operatives, their

2014, 89 min
by Matthias Bittner

War of Lies is the story of an Iraqi refugee, whose information about portable weapons of mass destruction passed through the hands of the BND, MI6 and CIA. This information was ultimately used by the US government to legitimize the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Today we know the war was based on a lie. The press blamed Rafed Aljanabi, he, though, proudly presents himself as the man who helped remove Saddam Hussein. Was Aljanabi really able to walk all over the world´s intelligence services and how