GLOBAL SCREEN GmbH

Germany 2020, 96 min
by Jörg Adolph

The whole world is talking about the environment, but frequently fails to listen to nature itself. Peter Wohlleben has changed all that: in THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES he opens our eyes to the hidden world of the woods.When Peter Wohlleben published his book “The Hidden Life of Trees” in 2015, he stormed all the bestseller charts overnight: no-one had ever written about the German woods like the forester from the parish of Wershofen before. Wohlleben tells us in an entertaining and enlightening fashion about the solidarity and cohesion of the trees and strikes a chord with his ever-growing community of readers: he brings us closer to these astounding living entities in guided tours of the woods and readings. Wohlleben travels to Sweden to see the oldest tree in the world; he visits businesses in Vancouver that are looking for a new approach to how to treat the woods; he sides with the Hambacher Forst demonstrators. Because he knows that we humans can only survive if the woods are healthy – and that the eleventh hour is already upon us…

Germany 2017, 90 min
by Christian Frey, Carsten Gutschmidt

During the Leningrad Blockade the conductor Karl Eliasberg receives an unbelievable assignment: surrounded by hunger, cold, and death he must conduct Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony with his surviving orchestra. Against all odds he accomplishes the impossible: For a short moment the war is interrupted by the sounds of the ’Leningrad Symphony‘ waft through the city all the way to German trenches. It is the heroic story of an orchestra and the symbolic triumph of art over the savagery of war. September 8th, 2016 marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Leningrad Blockade.

2017, 52 min
by Ingolf Gritschneder

On 6 March 2013, David Rossi, the director of communications of the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena fell from the window of his office. Did he jump or was he pushed? The film "Death of a Banker" investigates the Rossi case and its possible links to the shady dealings of the oldest bank in the world, which is currently sitting on billions of euro in bad loans and poses a significant risk to the European financial system.The investigation leads from tranquil Siena to the financial heart of London, where shortly after Rossi's death, another banker lost his life under mysterious circumstances...In the style of an exciting crime thriller, the documentary investigates the causes behind the fall from grace of the "Monte dei Paschi di Siena" and discusses possible serious failings on the part of the Italian banking supervisory authorities.

Germany 2017, 90 min
by Marc Wiese

There are over 45 million people living in slavery around the world. More than ever before in human history. This film traces their stories.Modern slavery has many faces, more than 45 million of them. Work slaves, sex slaves, domestic slaves and child soldiers. This film traces their stories. And seeks out the perpetrators: Unscrupulous profiteers, for whom people are mere commodities.In Thailand, slaves aged up to 15 years old are forced to work on fishing trawlers without breaks. It is a brutal trade in human beings perpetrated on the high seas. Very few manage to escape. As a result of his research for this documentary, director Marc Wiese succeeded in bringing about the conviction of one of the main offenders in Bangkok. Also, in a world first, a high-ranking member of the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) speaks on camera. The LRA has been conducting a gruesome guerrilla war for the past thirty years in the tri-border region of Uganda, DR Congo and Sudan and has, according to UN estimates, kidnapped up to 100,000 children and enslaved them as child soldiers.And yet there are the heroes who are battling modern slavery. Australian billionaire, Andrew Forrest is investing 300 million dollars in an attempt to curb slavery in India. In Mexico City, author Lydia Cacho encounters a small girl, who escaped from a child sex slave ring. Cacho takes her in and ultimately helps free 200 children.

Germany 2017, 52 min
by Jonas Niewianda, André Schäfer

While the First World War and its battles on the Western Front are still very much anchored in our memory of history, the simultaneous battle in the East appears now to have been largely forgotten. During the course of this military action, a peculiar, state-like entity was created, a German colony in Eastern Europe, a military utopia: the Land of Ober Ost. The occupied region was to become a productive state, completely under military command; a state that was to serve not least as a deployment zone for the impending war.

Germany 2017, 52 min
by Eva Gerberding

In the night of 30th December 1916, three shots are fired in the rear courtyard of Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg. These hit and kill one of the most controversial figures in the Tsarist Empire: Grigori Rasputin. He was a simple farmer from Siberia, who, thanks to his charisma and healing arts, made it all the way up to the Tsar's court. He not only penetrated the innermost circles of power, but even dared to warn the Tsar himself about the consequences of the Great War.The story of the pious vagabond who became one of the most influential men in Russia has become a popular legend of the 20th century. The film is a fascinating search for clues, which explores the background behind the deed. Animations bring Rasputin back to life and illustrate key points in his life and the treacherous murder.

2014, 80 min
by Hannah Leonie Prinzler

Did you know that 20% of your genes are patented and owned by private corporations? In a creative investigation director Hannah Leonie Prinzler uncovers who profits from patents, and who bears the social consequences. Along her journey she meets British inventor James Dyson and American business gurus in the Silicon Valley. She learns the shocking story of our body’s genes that we don’t own and finds out about the war strategies that patent attorneys apply. She travels to Geneva, the world’s headquarter of patents, and to India, the largest manufacturer of generic, meaning patent free, medicines. She shows what India has come up with to protect its genetic resources and meets Anil Gupta, the ‘Gandhi of Innovation‘. At the end of her trip she has a look at the world’s first open-source car.

Germany 2014, 96 min
by Arne Birkenstock

A mesmerizing, thought-provoking yet surprisingly amusing documentary on the life and times of Wolfgang Beltracchi, who tricked the international art world for nearly 40 years by forging and selling paintings of early 20th-century masters. A larger-than-life personality who was responsible for the biggest art forgery scandal of the postwar era.

Germany 2013, 69 min
by Robert Bohrer, Emma Rosa Simon

“One day the sea died, from one coast to the other, folding up, shrinking, a coat that is taken away.” This lament intoned by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral in her poem “The Death of the Sea”, this poeticised phantom pain, could just as well come from Bolivia. The country lost its access to the sea more than a hundred years ago – because of Chile. Unlike Mistral’s poem, however, they do not regard the sea as lost. It has survived as a lost horizon, a locus of national longing. One day Bolivia will return to the sea. This motto is repeated like a mantra, in schools, celebrating “Ocean Day”, in navy training. Yes, Bolivia allows itself the luxury of a navy in preparation of this glorious day, an “armada”, even if it’s navigating Lake Titicaca instead of the Pacific. The film delves deeply into the workings of this myth by following a group of conscripts through their naval training. Quite a few manoeuvres navigate the limits of absurdity, for example when the special divers’ unit leap into the lake with a bold “For Bolivia, goddam!”, or when the female soldiers wear fake high heels with their navy uniforms. Scenes that could have been captured by the wayside, between discipline and reverie, add to the panorama of a “maritime” country in the Andes that sticks to old ideals while taking tiny steps towards modernisation. (DOKLeipzig, Lars Meyer)

Germany 2013, 52 min
by Marc Wiese

The Bang Bang Club were four fearless young photographers who set out to expose the reality of Apartheid in South Africa – a battle that changed a nation but wound up almost destroying them. This is the story of an unheard-of success and of a tragedy. It is also the story of a great friendship in the fight for freedom in South Africa. In their early twenties, Ken Oosterbroek, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter and Greg Marinovich went to the black townships to record the violence there, something no other white photographer had ever dared to do. Their images went round the world and appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time Magazine. “Their photographs certainly accelerated the changes in this country, the end of apartheid. The images showed the whole world what was happening here and increased pressure on the regime”, recounts Peter Sullivan, then editor in chief of The Star in Johannesburg. “I told them every day: No picture is important enough or worth getting shot for. But they would laugh at me. I couldn't stop them. Every day they lived in danger. They were like wild horses“, says Sullivan. The four photographers were nicknamed Bang Bang Club by a magazine and became a legend. In 1991 Greg Marinovich won the Pulitzer Prize, the Oscar of photography, for his series of photos of a man getting burned. In 1994 Kevin Carter won the same prize for his controversial picture of a starving child and a vulture, which he shot during a journey to Sudan. Joao Silva stated “It was the photograph of Kevin’s lifetime, a photographer's dream. Yet, at the same time it destroyed him.” In the end the friends paid a high price; only two of them survived. This is the story of the Bang Bang Club. “These men were more than eyewitnesses to apartheid, but also adrenaline junkies who put themselves in harm's way; while bullets flew around them, they shot pictures that exploded like nuclear warheads across the world press.” (Variety)

Germany 2013, 90 min
by André Schäfer, Eva Gerberding

A look at the end of the last Czar and his family at the hand of the Bolsheviks, and the 4 centuries of grand, bloody and war-torn history that proceeded it - the might of the double-eagle throne fascinates us to this day. The killing lasted 20 minutes. Czar Nikolaus II. was the first to die – shot in the heart with a pistol at close range. Then the Bolsheviks shot his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna, his daughters Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia, the heir apparent Alexei, and four employees of the royal family. The death of the Romanovs marked the end of a dynasty reaching back to the crowning of Michail Romanov in July 1613. The Czars always ruled their huge empire with an iron fist – which in the end became their undoing. 400 years of Romanov rule – 4 centuries of grandiose and fateful European and Russian history.  This doc presents never-before-seen archive footage, shot in awe-inspiring and newly-restored locations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, told in fast-paced yet dramatic style. (Global Screen)

Germany 2012, 85 min
by Matt Sweetwood

Matt Sweetwood hails from the Midwest. He has lived in Germany for over ten years, but still the people and their culture remain a mystery to him. He undertakes a last-ditch attempt to figure the place out: By exploring the heart of German culture, their beer. If he delves into their rites and rituals, explores all the contradictions and stereotypes, will that make him, finally, a part of them? The infinite variety of beers, breweries and beer fests, the age-old history of beer, is more overwhelming than the American ever imagined it to be. The trail of his research leads him to places far off the beaten tourist path, light-years away from the Oktoberfest. He encounters people whose dialect he barely understands. Amazingly. he finds that a country as small a Germany is subdivided into a thousand different tongues and customs, with beer as the lowest common denominator. In BEERLAND, Sweetwood discovers a land full of oddities and contradictions. The new Teutons are deathly serious and silly at the same time, tradition-bound and weirdly visionary. Through his research, he finally gains a real bond to the people, finding friends where he least expected them.

Germany 2012, 111 min
by Marc Wiese

Shin Dong-Hyuk was born in one of the toughest prison camps of North Korea in 1983 and grew up there. All he knew was the hell of the camp. He only learned of the world on the other side of the barbed wire when a fellow prisoner told him about his life before detention. Shin decided to escape - but it wasn’t freedom he wanted, because he didn’t even know what that was. He wanted to eat his fill just once, even at the risk of being shot afterwards. At the age of 22, Shin successfully escaped. Today he lives alone in a small flat in South Korea, where Shin recounts his life in the penal colony in very intense interviews, his traumatisation obvious. But the director goes one step further by not limiting himself to the victim’s point of view. He also brings two perpetrators in front of his camera, people who tormented, tortured and killed. To illustrate life in the camp, he uses delicately drawn, restrained animations and original material. The quiet flow of the narrative and the unobtrusive but atmospheric soundtrack allow the protagonists and their stories the space they need. Gradually the inconceivable is taking shape, for even today 200,000 people in North Korea are living in internment camps. (Antje Stamer / DOKLeipzig)

Germany 2012, 90 min
by div

GOLDRUSH tells the story of the Treuhandanstalt - the most expensive experiment and the greatest white-collar-crime since Worldwar II. It’s a film about greed as the driving force of economic development. The trust agency 'Treuhand' was established to privatise the state owned enterprises of the GDR. Never before had there been an enterprise like the Treuhand that temporarily ran and speedily privatised 8,500 companies. With four million jobs at stake in East Germany, this was a novel and unique experiment and one under enormous pressure of time. It was doomed to fail. Over three million jobs were lost and 4.000 companies were closed. The Treuhand existed for 30 months. In this time it lost 250 million Marks a day - in the name of the Federal Republic. Furthermore, the Treuhand was defrauded out of at least 20 billion Marks. The scandal has never been entirely resolved and most of the perpetrators escaped prosecution or were never impeached. GOLDRUSH is not a historical piece - it is a film about the limitations of the social consensus. The film does not accuse, does not judge. It simply insists on the need to ask questions, even if the answers are not always conclusive.

Germany 2008, 52 min
by Angela Graas - Castor

They're on their way to the Southern Ocean on a special mission. A self-sufficient group, determined to make our world a slightly better place to live in for man and animal. Almost 40 young people from all over the world. Welded together for three months on a 70-metre-long piece of steel civilization … as Japan intendes to kill another 1000 whales south of the 60th parallel.

Germany 2018, 96 min
by Uli Gaulke

At the end of Mulholland Drive lies the Motion Picture & Television Fund. Its residents were once the backbone of the Dream Factory: actresses, producers, writers. The spry seniors still burn for movies and entertainment. And so, they share their best personal and professional anecdotes with us.A touching and lighthearted documentary about the glamourous residents of a very special retirement home, including actress Connie Sawyer (“Dumb and Dumber”, “When Harry Met Sally…”) three-time Emmy® Award nominated producer Joel Rogosin („The Virginian”, “Ironside”, “Magnum, P.I. and and producer Daniel Selznick ("American Grafitti"). [global screen]The palms in the garden of Motion Picture & Television Country House at Mulholland Drive sway soft in the light breeze under the evening sun. Here in Woodland Hills, a sleepy suburb nothwest of Hollywood, hides a fairly unique kind of home for quite special inhabitants – the refuge for the elderly of the US film industry. All those silent, invisible heroes who created classics such as “The Godfather“, "Blown by the wind", „The Appartement“ or “E.T.“ spend their time here looking back on a quite impressive and exciting life. Actors, writers, directors, cameramen, agents, make-up artists, costume designers and even big studio bosses end up here. Over 1000 elderly – more or less sprightly – live in this home strolling down memory lane. Famous Hollywood stars who are still in business, just like George Clooney, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, support the community with generous donations true to the motto: “We take care of our own“. [Fruitmarket]