Films by Kai Ziarkowski

Germany 2022, 117 min
by Pepe Danquart

Few portraits of artists give us the privilege of getting as close to a painter as if we had free access to his studio. Pepe Danquart was allowed to accompany the painter Daniel Richter for three years. He watched him paint with his camera, negotiate with his gallerist, talk with his publisher, and joke with his companion Jonathan Meese. He interviews collectors, attends auctions, and even visits record stores. In this way, the complex picture of a visual artist emerges, who is as inclined to the abstract as to the figurative and who seems to be constantly searching for the meaning of his work. On the art market, Daniel Richter's paintings fetch top prices - an aspect that neither Pepe Danquart nor the painter himself omit, but which fortunately is not the focus here. Openings, auctions and gala dinners give structure to the film narrative, but its heart is Richter's studio. There we experience him as a craftsman, a restless doer, who reflects astonishingly candidly and self-deprecatingly on his work, which for him is always also a political act. He talks about the process of creation, the effect, the meaning and significance of his own pictures, makes clear statements and, despite all his claims to validity, does not take himself more seriously than necessary. [65 DOK Leipzig, Christoph Terhechte]

Germany 2020, 90 min
by Sharon Ryba-Kahn

Sharon's relationship with Germany has always been conflictual to say the least, at the same this was something she had just accepted. This is true although, she was born in Munich and currently lives in Berlin. Sharon is Jewish and a third generation Shoah survivor. When her estranged father Moritz contacts her again after 7 years, it becomes an impetus for her to reconstruct her father's family history.  From here on a journey begins in which Sharon, tries to understand who her father is and who his parents were. After having survived the Holocaust her father's parents, who were originally from Poland arrived in Munich, in the American zone. They remained in Munich for the longest time. Sharon travels from place to place, from person to person trying to understand, how has the Shoah impacted her father's family. The past leads her always back to her own life, after all she is living in Germany. Little by little she also confronts her non-Jewish German environment.

Germany 2018, 135 min
by Volker Koepp

With SEESTÜCK, Volker Koepp concludes a series of documentaries that he began in 2010 with BERLIN-STETTIN. In this film, the director mixed autobiographical references with his description of East German film and living spaces for the first time. IN SARMATIA, 2013 he expanded the view of the region east of the Weichsel (Vistula) and between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. With LANDSTÜCK, 2016, Volker Koepp returned to the Uckermark in the north of Berlin. SEESTÜCK - a film about the Baltic Sea, about life by the sea and with the sea - concludes the series. As in the films before, the arcs of history are reflected here in the private lives of the present. The following also applies to the small Baltic Sea: landscape is world view.