Films by Ivonne Gärber

2024, 104 min
by Doris Metz

Petra Kelly was one of the most influential political personalities of the 20th century, a figurehead of the peace movement and co-founder of the first green party to find success. Her life was one of achievements, its end a tragedy.Petra Kelly was one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century. In 1980, she co-founded the German Green Party, the world’s first green party to rise to prominence. She fought relentlessly for radical social change, disarmament and a society at one with nature. For Kelly, environment, peace and human rights issues were one. At the age of 44, she was murdered by her long-time friend and political companion. Raised by her mother and grandmother, she grew up in 1960s America and campaigned for Robert Kennedy’s election in the months before his assassination. Petra Kelly was convinced that a single person could change the world. Influenced by the American civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s concept of “civil disobedience”, she campaigned to protect the environment and ban uranium mining, demonstrating solidarity with the peace movements in both the East and West. Today, her spiritual legacy is continued by many young climate activists. The issues that concerned her are more topical today than ever before. Close friends and companions talk about Kelly’s personal and political life for the first time. With previously unseen international film footage, the film paints a picture of a sensitive, unwavering woman who let no one -stand in her way. [NEW DOCS catalogue]

Germany 2022, 52 min
by Daniela Schmidt-Langels

Many famous people, from Albert Einstein and Picasso to Steven Spielberg are known to be dyslexic. Hardly any aspect of school-based learning has been researched as extensively as dyslexia over the last 130 years. But researchers still have no clear idea of what causes the condition and how it can be treated. The film shines a spotlight on the difficult and psychologically challenging situation faced by people with dyslexia in everyday life in Germany, Great Britain and France. It looks at success stories and highlights researchers’ tireless efforts to identify causes and find suitable therapies.

Germany 2019, 84 min
by Aysun Bademsoy

The National Socialist Underground murders in the early 2000s left scars. Not only among the relatives of the victims, but also in the migrant communities and the entire German society.TRACES follows these scars and poses the question of whether such injuries can ever heal completely.“Between September 2000 and April 2007, nine immigrant businessmen and a German policewoman were murdered. (…) I read the news about the murders and thought: That could have been my father or my brother.” We’re talking about the murders of the self-proclaimed National Socialist Underground (NSU) which came to light through the main perpetrators’ suicide. After the end of the five-year NSU trial against their co-perpetrators and supporters, filmmaker Aysun Bademsoy goes in search of the traces left by this crime series: in the victims’ families and migrant communities, where the investigators had first investigated exclusively and sowed deep mistrust with speculations of drug trafficking and the Mafia, not least with assignations like “Kebap Murders”. “The NSU murdered my father. The investigators stained his honour. In doing so, they killed him a second time,” a surviving daughter says after the – to her disappointing – judgement was pronounced. Confidence in the German state was deeply shaken and the trial, a sobering experience for all families which left many things in the dark, destroyed rather than restored it. A film about surviving – despite everything.(DOK Leipzig, Frederik Lang)