Films by Ines Thomsen

2023, 103 min
by Mark Michel

HERDERS – GUARDIANS OF THE EARTH follows five herders and their families in Peru, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, India and Germany throughout the seasons. For months they trek through changing landscapes with their herds, living only from what nature provides. It is a life far from the romantic picture we have, a life under harsh conditions, in direct contact with nature and its extreme elements – birth, death, storm and sun, rain and drought are fundamental parts of their lives. HERDERS tells the story of their struggles for survival. Their animals are partners, even friends.HERDERS – GUARDIANS OF THE EARTH is a graceful and moving meditation on a disappearing life form. Tender and unsentimental at the same time. In landscapes of remarkable size and beauty, the film portrays the lives of the often invisible and marginalised pastoralist cultures that exist throughout the world. The film captures the beauty and hardship of this dying way of life, explores the deep and ancient union between people and animals, and tells of a way of food production and a way of life that gives more back to the nature and to humanity than what it takes away. There is a wisdom in the ancient practices of nomadic pastoralism that deserves to be preserved and protected. Time for a tribute. And a chance to rethink.

Germany 2014, 86 min
by Andre Siegers

Alfred D. is fond of travelling, a veritable collector of countries. While on his travels, he films the world and himself. Alfred D. is a member of the Social Democratic Party too and represented the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Nepal, Warsaw and elsewhere during the 90s, carrying out democratisation campaigns and making educational films about the role of money in market economies. He also took acting lessons, reported on the Berlinale for a Swabian newspaper and ran for office in the 2009 European elections. He’s never without his camera. Alfred in the Libyan desert, Alfred talking to former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Alfred with his terminally ill girlfriend, Alfred in the bath, Alfred with elephants in South Africa – in the provinces and in faraway lands, an advocate of different worldviews, sporadically asking what it all means. Madness? Normality? The political establishment is one big adventure. Slotting selected footage shot by this avid amateur filmmaker into a frame story about Alfred disappearing into the Arctic ice and accompanied by fictitious letters in voiceover, this cannily edited film sets out on an expedition of its own: into the realm of German mores.

Germany 2014, 80 min
by Ines Thomsen

The infamous El Raval quarter, with its narrow lanes full of dark figures, lies in the middle of Barcelona, in the Old Town, near the water. Where earlier, sailors shared the cheap little flats with working families, migrants from all over the world now characterise the area. In the small alleys their little barbershops lie side by side. Each nationality has its own. The businesses cater for parallel societies and have little contact with one another. Whoever enters apparently leaves Spain behind to plunge into a safe place of familiar rituals and memories of home. The barbers live from their regular customers and their almost pastoral ability to constantly talk about everything and nothing, or remain silent, whilst they softly touch and courageously beautify the heads and cheeks of the weary and burdened.     The film tells of four hairdressers and their customers in El Raval, four small, strange time and space capsules, of people who left their home to find a better one, while the Spaniards are about to leave their own country themselves. 

Germany 2010, 73 min
by Sonja Baeger

As we get to know the internationally reknowned, Berlin based, German artist Thomas Zipp, we discover the background of his installations, which refer to the human urge of hubris and selfdestruction and are dark and humourous at the same time. His interest in psychonautics – the research of the psyche and the subconscious – is the angle from which he questions the supporting pillars of our culture and education. As he connects acknowledged values and historical characters beyond logic, he uses the freedom of art to create and claim a playfully anarchistic monument of thought. Another important part of Thomas Zipp's way of expressing himself is music. In various constellations with artist-friends they improvise a kind of psychedelic noise-rock, enriched with self-developed instruments, like a cast- iron bell (with the inscription: mind over matter) and air-raid sirens. The film has no voice-over and interweaves looking and thinking about art within the flow of storytelling. It consists of a broad variety of situations and moods: from daytoday life to being the star of his shows, up to all-night music-sessions in a country house, where art-production and rock 'n' roll come together. In chronological order of events, the scenes become a contemporary document (2006-2009), which turns the introduction to the art of Thomas Zipp into a film experience.

Germany 2008
by Undine Siepker

Welcome aboard INTERFLUG, the only airline of the former German Democratic Republic! Fasten your seatbelts on this turbulent flight through the lives of an East-German flight crew. Four stewardesses and one pilot look back at a time when crossing borders between East and West was the privilege of only a few. With their western adventures and outsider-perspective on GDR-life, they experience the fall of the Berlin Wall differently: Like a hard landing when INTERFLUG was shut down in 1991, but also like a head-start into a new life. How did they manage? Head in the clouds or feet back on the ground - Where do they stand today? Reviving the turbulences of German history, the film navigates through the difficulties of living a self-determined life before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.