The Match Factory GmbH

Mexico, Germany 2023, 102 min
by Tatiana Huezo

A young mother runs across a mountain meadow with her children and they save a sheep from drowning. A girl cares for her elderly grandmother so tenderly that you want to cry while another practices being a teacher with just the right tone of voice, her dolls lined up before her as willing pupils. The fathers are mostly absent: as construction workers or tradesmen, they rarely share their daily lives with their families. In El Eco, a remote village in northern Mexico, life consists of the most elementary things. Being a child here is an intense experience from day one, involving nature, animals and people. But also love, intimacy, illness and death. And education – at least for the younger generation.Tatiana Huezo has made a name for herself as a sensitive and poetic documentarian (e.g. Tempestad, Forum, 2016). Accompanying three families in her new work, the notion of meandering becomes an informing principle as she brilliantly weaves a host of faces and gestures into a kaleidoscope of unpretentiousness. Almost incidentally, she portrays the care-working matriarchy in a country notorious for its innumerable kidnappings of women and girls. A tender film that celebrates the grace of animals and the children of this earth alike.Jury of Encounters 73 BERLINALE: For the gentle confidence and uncompromising honesty in directing, which magnifies both the powerful human qualities of its protagonists as well as their connection with nature, the best director award goes to Tatiana Huezo for her film EL ECO.Berlinale Documentary Award 73 BERLINAE: In rural surroundings, young people discover the world. Luminous, intimate images of a grandmother, rainstorms, and school classrooms reveal a complex community. This deeply affectionate film shows time passing, a world opening up. It is a fascinating new piece in the director’s already distinguished body of work. Our award goes to Tatiana Huezo for EL ECO.

Lithuania, France, Germany 2022, 112 min
by Mantas Kvedaravicius, Hanna Bilobrova

In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius went back to Ukraine, Mariupol, at the heart of the war, to be with the people he had met and filmed in 2015. Following his death, his producers and collaborators have put all their strength into continuing transmitting his work, his vision and his films. Also a PhD in anthropology, Mantas Kvedaravičius wished to testify as a filmmaker as far as possible from the agitation of the media and the politicians. With huge force and sensitivity, Mariupolis 2 depicts life as it continues amidst the bombing and reveals images that convey both tragedy and hope."Do you know what the most incredible thing was, about Mariupol? No one feared death, even if people thought they did. Death was already there, and everyone wanted to die valuable. People would help each other, even if it meant risking their lives. People would smoke outside and chat, even if the bombs were falling. Money stopped existing, and life was too short to recall it, and everyone was happy with what they had, becoming better versions of themselves; there was no past or future or judgment, or talk between the lines. That was heaven in hell. That was the delicate butterfly wings touching closer. That was the smell of the naked value of death. That was life there." (Shooting notes)

Brasil, France, Germany 2021, 99 min
by Karim Aïnouz

Algerien par accident flirts between the fiction and the documentary, even the auto-fiction. Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian director, by using his personal background, invites the audience to follow/discover an incredible journey through space and time, with an original and usually unknown prism/aspect: The strong bound between Algeria and Brazil, two countries with political and revolutionary strikes that moulded their evolution.With the support of: ANCINE, ARTE FRANCE - LA LUCARNE, CNC, PROCIREP ANGOA, SANAD, Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Literary Colloquium as part of the Grenzgänger funding programme, Fundação Paradiso

Italy, France, Germany 2020, 100 min
by Gianfranco Rosi

Notturno was shot over the past three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon. A region where tyranny, invasions and terrorism have fed off each other in a vicious circle, to the detriment of the civilian populations. All around signs of violence and destruction: but in the foreground is the humanity that reawakens every day from a nocturne that seems infinite. NOTTURNO, a film of light on the darkness of war.

Netherlands, Germany, Belgien, Ireland 2014, 90 min
by Tommy Pallotta, Femke Wolting

In Somalia, piracy is far less socially acceptable than it was a few years ago. And yet necessity still forces fishermen into the clutches of the pirate recruiters. One experienced pirate is Mohamed, who, like many others, took to piracy in order to survive in his country. His fiancé’s parents do not look at all kindly on his activity, for life as a pirate on the high seas has become increasingly dangerous since these waters are now tightly controlled. There’s not much left of the heroic image that pirates once enjoyed, either. Yet many families are reliant on the income from piracy, although the spoils are not what they once were. Mohamed has to decide if he should capture one last ship or begin a new life with his fiancé – albeit with uncertain prospects. Using a mixture of animation, documentary and dramatised scenes, the film describes how Mohamed became a pirate. His complex situation is portrayed from different angles: compelling animation sequences show how ships are captured by pirates, but they also depict Mohamed’s childhood and show how drought and war forced him to leave his home.

Austria, Germany 2013, 120 min
by Erwin Wagenhofer

We’re living in times of sweeping changes, crises and disori- entation. The financial system, energy, climate change: All the problems in these areas have one thing in common, they were created by humans. Many were created by humans educated at the world’s best universities and institutions. Is this mess a side effect of their education, or the underlying attitudes and approach? Is the main problem the structure of our brains, and therefore the structure of our outdated thinking? We will never find the courage and inspiration to solve tomorrow’s problems by applying yesterday’s solutions! Nowhere else is that fact so obvious as in our educational system, where the greatest opportunities and talents are eradicated by improper methods and forcing everyone into standardized molds. Rather than standardization and economic utility, creativity, diversity and sustainability must be the focus of new educational institu- tions! In the future, education must abandon yesterday’s sys- tematic preaching from on high and instead foreground the re- alization of potential and enriching students through diversity and variety. And lastly: Who will start this process if we don’t?!

Germany, France 2024, 98 min
by Victor Kossakovsky

From filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky (Gunda, Aquarela) comes an epic, intimate and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction — and offer hope for survival and a way forward.Centering on a landscape project by the Italian architect Michele de Lucci, Kossakovsky uses the circle to reflect on the rise and fall of civilizations, capturing breathtaking imagery from the temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, dating back to AD 60, to the recent destruction of cities in Turkey following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in early 2023.Rocks and stone connect the disparate societies, from ghostly monoliths stuck in the earth to tragic heaps of concrete rubble waiting to be hauled off and repurposed anew. Through Kossakovsky’s inquisitive lens, the grandeur and folly of humanity and its precarious relationship with nature posits the urgent question: How do we build, and how can we build better, before it’s too late?With: Michele de Lucchi, Mauro Mella, Davide Alioli, Nick Steur, Abdul Nabi Al-Afi

Austria, Germany 2019, 116 min
by Erwin Wagenhofer

Filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer doesn't make it that easy for himself. In his latest film BUT BEAUTIFUL he’s looking for the beautiful and the good in life and he finds people who break new ground. What could a good, a happy life look like? Is a 'different' life actually possible? The result is a film about new perspectives without fear, about connectedness in music, nature and society, and about people with different ideas sharing one big common goal: a sustainable world.Women without formal school education who build solar panels for villages all over the world. Permaculture visionaries on La Palma who transform wastelands into a green paradise. A forester who develops and builds the healthiest houses in the world. A spiritual leader with a waggish sense of humour and essential messages. His Tibetan sister with a big heart for the youth. A young jazz trio, an established pianist and a soulful Colombian singer, who bestow upon us the sound of beauty. With Kenny Werner, Barbara & Erich Graf, Shanaz Banu, Bunker Roy, Kamla Devi, Basanta, Lucia Pulido, Erwin Thoma, Mario Rom, Lukas Kranzelbinder, Herbert Pirker, Jetsum Pema, Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

2016, 89 min
by Corinna Belz

A film about words and about a luminary of modern literature: about Peter Handke, with Peter HandkeIn her new documentary, filmmaker Corinna Belz explores the enigma that is Peter Handke. His book titles read like the tunes on a jukebox, like the watchwords of several successive generations of readers: ‘Offending the Audience’, ‘The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty’, ‘A Sorrow Beyond Dreams’, ‘Short Letter, Long Farewell’, and ‘The Weight of the World’. In the ‘60s, Peter Handke showed how to walk the walk of the author-cum-popstar. Yet the moment he made the bestseller lists, he turned his back on all that. He went traveling, taking his readers along with him, into the rhythm and precision of his language, the long, pulsating sentences, the invention and examination of reality. The film shows Mr. Handke as a young man and in his daily life today, always devoted to language, posing the burning questions: Where are we now? And, to quote one of his early films: How to live?

Germany 2012, 88 min
by Nadav Schirman

Magdalena Kopp was married to the most wanted terrorist in the world: Carlos ‘The Jackal’. She followed him through the birth of international terrorism, of which he became the star. From the small conservative Bavarian town where she grew up, to the ’68 revolutionary zeitgeist of Berlin and the radical leftist cells of Frankfurt, Magdalena was easily influenced. Driven by a need to belong, she found herself in the arms of the man who was fast becoming the first celebrity-terrorist in the world. She trained with Palestinian freedom fighters, fought alongside their national heroes. She followed him into dangerous international intrigues, from Damascus to Bagdad and Paris, in a nebulous world of secret services and shady governments, and gave birth to their daughter Rosa. When Magdalena realized that the political ideals were long gone, and only greed for power stood behind their violent struggle, it was too late, she was too deeply involved. For some Carlos is a revolutionary, to others a murderer, but for Rosa he’s a father, one she has not seen in 19 years, one she only knows through the media. While Carlos stands trial in Paris, mother and daughter take a courageous journey beyond the shadows of his myth.

Germany 2011, 97 min
by Corinna Belz

Gerhard Richter, one of the internationally most significant contemporary artists, granted filmmaker Corinna Belz access to his studio in 2009 where he was working on a series of large abstract paintings. GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING offers us rare insights into the artist’s work. In quiet, highly concentrated images, the film gives us a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a very personal, tension-filled process of artistic creation. We see Richter painting. We see him observe and dialogue with his paintings. We see him contemplate, wait, reject, rework and sometimes destroy only to begin anew. Our perceptions expand. The paintings themselves become the protagonists. GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING is the penetrating portrait of an artist at work – and a fascinating film about the art of seeing.