Films by Alexandros Topalis

France, Germany 2022, 99 min
by Stephane Malterre

27,000 photos of civilian detainees tortured to death were stolen from the Syrian regime’s secret archives by a military defector codenamed Caesar, and made public in 2014. But international justice proves impotent in prosecuting the criminal Syrian state. As the case seems doomed to oblivion, victims’ families, along with activists and Caesar himself, seek truth and justice through state courts across Europe instead. More than five years of investigations and fighting will lead to the first trial against high officials of the Syrian death machine.

2020, 96 min
by Doris Metz, Imogen Kimmel

We accompany a world-renowned transgender surgeon and his patients, each in a different stage of gender reassignment. A film full of feeling that unfolds the full spectrum and radicalness of this transition.Transgender people or those who do not fit into rigid gender assignments have always existed. For them, sex reassignment surgery is often the most important step towards feeling like their “true self”. The surgical methods are constantly improving. People who feel that they belong to the “wrong”, i.e. not their biological gender, are still a mystery to science. Why would anyone consciously harm their healthy body in order to change their sex? We accompany trans people in different phases of their transition over a period of one year. They are all patients of Dr. Schaff, an international luminary who has carried out over 6,000 gender reassignment operations. He is a trailblazer who is constantly improving and perfecting his surgical methods. We observe him at work in Munich and accompany him to San Francisco, where we glimpse the future of transgender surgery. A radically different picture presents itself in Moscow, where trans people live in social isolation and Dr. Schaff can only operate undercover under almost antediluvian conditions. (NEW DOCS)