Films by Frank Schwaiger

Germany 2023, 42 min
by Ira Tondowski

When doctors discover that Leonard has brittle bone disease, they give him a life expectancy of one year. Today, Leonard is in his mid-20s, a screenwriter, director and actor. He gets around in a wheelchair, he is small, his body is different, he lives independently and self-determined, and he says: "I don't hate my body. I find my body annoying sometimes, yes, and I have goals that sometimes go beyond that, but these are still achievable."

2016, 88 min
by Signe Astrup

When the Berlin Wall crumbled down in 1989 and six months later East and West Germany united, more than 250.000 highly skilled East German soldiers lost their jobs, their homeland and everything they believed in.Stasi officers, border guards, and police agents social image plummeted from “model citizens” to criminal perpetrators blamed for their part in Germany’s dark 20th century history. More than 25 years later filmmaker Signe Astrup meets some of those former GDR soldiers who today find the