Films by Chris Wright

Switzerland, Germany, Georgia 2021, 91 min
by Salomé Jashi

The opening shot of filmmaker Salomé Jashi’s striking environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea. Its destination lies within a garden countless miles away, privately owned by a wealthy and anonymous man whose passion resides in the removal, and subsequent replanting, of foreign trees into his own man-made Eden.With astonishing cinematic style,Taming the Garden tracks the surreal uprooting of ancient trees from their Georgian locales. With each removal, tensions flare between workers and villagers. Some see financial incentives—new roads, handsome fees—while others angrily mourn the loss of what was assumed an immovable monolith of their town’s collective history and memory. With a steady and shrewdly observant eye, Jashi documents a single man’s power over Earth’s natural gardens: how majestic living artifacts of a country’s identity can so effortlessly become uprooted by individuals with no connection to the nature they now claim as their own.

Germany 2021, 111 min
by Chris Wright, Stefan Kolbe

The filmmakers first meet Stefan in 2015, in the therapy ward of Brandenburg Prison. Their first impression is of a polite, shy man. A warder tells them Stefan is an ice-cold woman-killer.The filmmakers follow him through the last years of his prison term. They face some uncomfortable questions. Can anyone really know what is going on inside this man? The part of the protagonist is taken by a puppet, the scenes shift into theatre. Truth and falsehood blend in a cascade of presumption.

Germany, Austria 2019, 218 min
by Thomas Heise

The film picks up the biographical pieces of a family torn apart through the end of the 19th and into the 20th century.The used material is what remained of Thomas Heise’s family.It is about people who by chance found each other, only then to lose each other.Now it is their descendants, their children and grandchildren who are beginning to disappear.Fathers and mothers, sons and brothers, the affairs, the hurt and the joy in landscapes of transition – each bearing the intertwining, hallmarks of their times. A collage of images, sounds, letters, diaries, notes, voices, fragments of time and space.

Germany 2018, 72 min
by Andreas Goldstein

My father Klaus Gysi - Jew and communist - made his career in the former GDR after years of illegality in Nazi Germany. The fall of socialism burnt his life efforts in one brief moment. The film THE COMMUNIST tries to reflect on his failure from the viewpoint of my own experiences within this historical time. My fundamental historical experience is opportunism. 1990 people already forgot what they believed in the year before. So did my father, one of the leading operatives of the GDR, who now calls the state he worked for all his life a dictatorship which should have been prevented. A sudden change of heart which disturbed me and was the reason to make this movie.

Germany 2016, 101 min
by Susanne Binninger

They fight in cages. Because they want to, and because others want to see this. Andreas Kraniotakes, Khalid Taha and Lom-Ali Eskijev are professionals in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). They fight in duels on stage using all means permitted. They work hard and live ascetically, often under precarious conditions. Their lives are marked by friendship, discipline and unconditional respect for each other and for their opponents. Kraniotakes, Taha and Eskijew share the dream of being recognized as athletes and of being successful on an international level. They have to pay a high price for this. In Germany, MMA fighters are rarely respected as athletes and can hardly live from fighting. They are under great pressure: as modern gladiators they may not age, may not get injured – and actually must not lose.

2016, 40 min
by Chris Wright, Stefan Kolbe

Sarah and Daniel are having a baby. Sarah is 19, Daniel 24. We made another film with Sarah, THE HOME, about her time in a children’s home. She was 12.Her mother died 11 years before. Later, we visited Sarah in the home again, when she was 15. Her sister Nancy was pregnant, at 19. Sarah thought that was stupid. Sarah now has a baby with Daniel and they call her Marie. Sarah, Marie and Daniel.Daniel also grew up without his parents. A short film about the possibility of love in a world where love is seldom seen.

Germany 2014, 90 min
by Stefan Kolbe, Chris Wright

What happens when two atheist film-makers are given free rein in a religious seminary? A seminary in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther once launched the Reformation, but the percentage of Christians is now the lowest in Europe? For a year, Chris Wright & Stefan Kolbe followed a group of young men and women through the final phase of training for the Protestant priesthood. We see them learn the tools of religious practice. But gradually, the focus shifts; both protagonists and film-makers are confronted with the most fundamental human questions. The boundaries dissolve, between faith and scepticism, comfort and despair, truth and madness. What follows is an open, intimate dialogue on our longing for love, kinship and meaning.

Germany 2010, 28 min
by Chris Wright, Stefan Kolbe

Seeing God is not proof, says Kevin, aged 13. No, feeling is the only real proof of God's love. It was God's hand that brought his family from Kazakhstan to Germany. Now he joins his parents at their Pentecostal church three times a week. And since a healthy spirit needs a healthy body, Kevin boxes. He trains with his father in the garden. Kevin is tired. He doesn't want to study, when he's older. "It makes you turn away from God. What I really want is a nice garden. I'll do it myself, like my father." THE DISCIPLE is a film from the alien world of Kevin's routine.

Germany 2010, 87 min
by Stefan Kolbe, Chris Wright

On the black earth of Germany\'s agricultural heartland stands a medieval castle. Upstairs, seven teenagers and their carers. The boundaries of life are school and chatroom, clandestine date and job interview. Gradually, a year passes and the world grows with us. This is a film about finding your place in this world, in this time. And, inevitably, about carrying the burdens parents can lay on us.