Films by Carsten Rau

Germany 2023, 87 min
by Pia Lenz

Eva is 83 and Dieter 86. They danced together for the first time in the winter of 1952. They wrote love letters to each other and imagined a life together. They got married, built a house and had three children. They lost one daughter. At the beginning of filming, Eva and Dieter have been a couple for 66 years. What remains of that and what still counts now? This is what the feature documentary film FOR EVER by award winning director and cinematographer Pia Lenz is about.

Germany 2021, 90 min
by Hauke Wendler

The monobloc plastic chair is the best-selling piece of furniture that ever existed, known on every continent, across all national borders and social boundaries. Estimates claim that there are a billion units of this chair worldwide. At the very least. A feature-length documentary, MONOBLOC tells the story of how this unsightly plastic chair took the world by storm. How this chair destroys livelihoods and brings affluence. How it threatens our environment and ‘good taste’. Yet also about how the monobloc chair makes disabled people happy and the many, many millions to whom a chair is a chair and nothing more. MONOBLOC is structured into 7 episodes, filmed on 5 continents. Each of these episodes tells a self-contained story involving different themes, inter alia beauty and design, economic rise and competition, globalisation and efficiency, ideas and ideals. To accomplish this the film accompanies protagonists, both men and women, whose lives are closely linked to the monobloc. The feature-length documentary MONOBLOC pieces all these stories together via a simple, clear-cut dramatic composition to form an intriguing, highly entertaining, and in parts deeply moving quest for clues around the globe. Based on the examples of his protagonists, the award-winning director Hauke Wendler breaks our ultracomplex consumer world down to the question of what it truly takes in life to be happy. Distinctively marked by powerful images, a film that lives through its contrasts: In Germany, Italy and the USA. From the slums of Brazil across the megacities of India to the velds and savannahs of Uganda.

Germany 2020, 94 min
by Carsten Rau

Germany is turning away from nuclear power in 2022. Yet the country's nuclear nightmare goes on: with umpteen thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste and the hazardous dismantling of power plants which will take decades. NUCLEAR FOREVER by Carsten Rau takes an equally profound and alarming look at mankind's dream of atomic energy, in grand scenes that have yet to be portrayed like this, and in six interwoven episodes.In the end, the viewer can and must form their own impression of the mania called nuclear power. That has no end.

Germany 2016, 85 min
by Hauke Wendler, Carsten Rau

They come in the night, tear families from their sleep, give them just enough time to pack and put them on a plane: this is the role of the so-called 'transportation commandos’ comprising police officers and immigration officials. In 2015, over 22,000 failed asylum seekers were deported from Germany.The documentary DEPORTATION CLASS presents a comprehensive view of this state enforcement measure for the first time: from detailed planning in the office to night-time operations at asylum seeker accommodation blocks and the arrival of asylum seekers back in their respective homelands – and the question of what awaitsthem there.http://www.deportation-class-film.de

Germany 2016, 95 min
by Pia Lenz

Over the course of a year Pia Lenz followed the Syrian girl Ghofran, aged 11, and the Romanies-boy Djaner, aged 7, who came together with their families to Germany as refugees, in their search to find a place for themselves. The perspective of these children offers a clear and very moving view of this new cohabitation in Germany one year after the arrival of over a million refugees. The film asks the question: How can we give a homeland to those who most urgently need a future?

Germany 2011, 90 min
by Hauke Wendler, Carsten Rau

Wadim K. grew up in Germany. But he never received a German passport, because his parents were refugees. In 2005 he found himself being deported to Latvia – a country he could hardly remember. During his final visit to Hamburg he threw himself in front of a train. Through photos and very personal family videos as well as interviews with Wadim’s parents, friends and other contemporary witnesses, the 90-minute film WADIM pieces together the mosaic of a short life, representative of the lives led by 87,000 other people with only a provisional status to stay in Germany. It questions the inflexible scaffold of residence rights legislation and causes people to think about very topical issues: Where do people belong? What does the word ‘home’ mean? And can you take it away from someone by law?