Films by Henrik Cordes

Germany 2019, 103 min
by Elke Margarete Lehrenkrauss

When night falls in rural Germany, old VW-caravans decorated with flashy lights line the country roads which lead through potato fields and dark forests. Inside theses buses prostitutes from Eastern Europe and Africa await their clients who are passing by. The film portraits these women who came from far away in search for money and a better life. Until one day, in the ghostly atmosphere, a murder on one of the prostitutes happens and shakes up the whole scenery causing everybody to take action. A film about a microcosm that describes a society at the hardest end of a globalized capitalism.

2016, 96 min
by Till Harms

687 candidates, 10 places, 9 instructors in 10 days. Year for year, the entrance exam at the National Acting School in Hanover is a special challenge for the candidates, but it is also an extraordinary endurance test for the staff. In the battle for the best talent, the examiners are just as passionately involved as the candidates themselves in filling the few coveted admissions. Up close and personal with the instructors and professors, the film focuses on an unknown side of the process, that of the examination committee. The viewers have the opportunity to form their own opinion of the selection and assessment criteria. Conventional perceptions of the examiners and the candidates are shaken and the viewers get to know the members of the commission as human beings, who constantly question themselves and their standards and fight for their personal favorites.For the first time in Germany, such a committee opens up to the camera. Three years of preparation were necessary before all academy doors were opened to filmmaker Till Harms. A unique behind-the-scenes look at university operations, an unfiltered view of the dream job of an actor in a microcosm of hope, professional demands, and pugnacious colleagues.