Films by Lars Barthel

Germany 2022, 88 min
by Pamela Meyer-Arndt

REBEL BEINGS unveils the fight for survival of three female artists behind the iron curtain of the GDR. As young women in Cold War era East Germany, Cornelia Schleime, Gabriele Stötzer and Tina Bara were repressed and persecuted by the socialist system and the Stasi for their art and political protest. At the lowest point, they only had cameras and their bodies left in order to express themselves. This film intimately explores their fearless struggle for existence, creative freedom and exceptional artistic works. Almost four decades later the GDR ceases to exist, but its traumatic impact on the artists lives remains.

Germany 2022, 52 min
by Lars Barthel, Marian Kiss

Rasta Gracie dreams of owning her own store to help her support her daughters. The film offers an insight into the everyday life of a feisty Rasta woman and her friends, the healers.Gracie and her Rasta friends, Quaco and Robert, live in eastern Jamaica, at the foot of the Blue Mountains. Gracie is a larger-than-life Rasta woman who loves to rap. She lives in a village with just 400 inhabitants with her ten-year-old daughter Anna. Her elder daughter lives with her mother-in-law in Kingston. Gracie doesn't have enough money to support both children. She's a street trader. Every week, she travels in an overcrowded truck to the market in Kingston, laden with bananas and coconuts and whatever else is in season. She buys her goods on credit from local farmers. The profit she makes pays for the bare essentials. But Gracie follows her grandmother's motto: "Help yourself and help will come to you". Gracie's friends Quaco and Robert also call themselves "grandma's sons". As kids, they used to scour the "rainforest pharmacy" for medicinal plants with their grandmothers. Rasta Quaco is one of the "top two" healers, says Robert. When he's not travelling with Quaco, Robert drives a taxi and also helps Gracie, who is looking for cheap building materials. Gracie's big dream is to build a small store next to her house. She hopes it will earn her enough money to bring home her older daughter Selassia.

Germany 2020, 104 min
by Jana Matthes, Andrea Schramm

Yaar is a young Jewish Berliner who dreams of being a game designer someday. He associates nothing with Judaism but lambs being led to the slaughter house. He accuses his father of suffering from the Holocaust despite never even having experienced it firsthand. Yaar rebels by developing a computer game: "Shoah. When God was asleep". He creates a virtual Germany of the 1940s where Jews can defend themselves and Nazis don't necessarily have to be bad guys. Then, his own family's history turns his plans upside down.TACHELES - The Heart of the Matter - shows how the traumas of the survivors can even make their ways into the third generation's lives. The film asks the burning question from the perspective of a 21-old: What does Holocaust have to do with me today?

Germany 2018, 84 min
by Lars Barthel

Lars Barthel asks his Jamaican wife Antoinette why she often wears hair extensions. This personal curiosity leads Lars and his film to some complex and politically-charged questions. What is the relationship between hair and racism? And where do the hair extensions actually come from?

Germany, Austria 2017, 94 min
by Christian Tod

What would you do if your income were taken care of?Just a few years ago, an unconditional basic income was considered a pipe dream. Today, this utopia is more imaginable than ever before - intense discussions are taking place in all political and scientific camps.FREE LUNCH SOCIETY provides background information about this idea and searches for explanations, possibilities and experiences regarding its implementation.Globalization, automation, Donald Trump. The middle class is falling apart. One hears talk about the causes, rather than about solutions. Time for a complete rethinking: An unconditional basic income means money for everyone - as a human right without service in return! Visionary reform project, neoliberal axe to the roots of the social state or socially romantic left-wing utopia? Depending on the type and scope, a basic income demonstrates very different ideological visions. Which side of the coin one sees depends on one's own idea of humankind: inactivity as sweet poison that seduces people into laziness, or freedom from material pressures as a chance for oneself and for the community. Do we actually need the whip of existential fear to avoid a lazy, depraved life in front of the TV set? Or does gainful employment give our lives meaning and social footing simply because we haven't known anything else for centuries? And because we've never all had the freedom to self-actualise in other ways?That basic income is a powerful idea is indisputable: land, water and air are gifts of nature. They are different from private property that humans create by their individual effort. However, when we receive wealth from nature, from the commons, then that wealth belongs to all of us equally. From Alaska's oil fields to the Canadian prairie, from Washington's think tanks to the Namibian steppes, the film takes us on a grand journey and shows us what the driverless car has to do with the ideas of a German billionaire and a Swiss referendum. FREE LUNCH SOCIETY, the first international film in cinemas about basic income, is dedicated to one of the most crucial questions of our times.

2015, 90 min
by Lars Barthel, Gabriele Denecke, Peter Kahane, Thomas Knauf, Ralf Marschalleck, Hannes Schönemann, Andreas Voigt

Gabriele Denecke, Lars Barthel, Peter Kahane, Thomas Knauf, Ralf Marschalleck, Hannes Schönemann und Andreas Voigt are the directors of this portmonteau (omnibus) film. They look back to their childhood and youth in the late fifties and sixties in the GDR. Some were fellow students at the Filmschool in Babelsberg or they met at work in DEFA Studios.For this film they re-nited once more. They looked through their private archives and recall everyday life in divided Berlin and East Germany. They narrate about family life, their relationship to the West, about fathers, who disappeared behind the wall, their own attempts to adapt to the socialist reality and beliefs, about the strong wish to leave. In a wide range of cinematic styles, they express their memories about friendship and distrust, about youthful pride, juvenile protest, about hope and disappointment, looking for an answer to the question: How was it, when we were the Future?

Germany 2013, 74 min
by Helga Reidemeister

S H A T T E R E D AFGHANISTAN recounts, in fragments, stories of tender affinity and existential need. In Kabul’s National Museum, Afghan archeologists attempt to reassemble works of art that were shattered by the Taliban. Their attempts seem surreal. Street scenes of the destroyed city leave us confused, stuck between curiosity and horror. The misery of more than thirty years of war comes painfully alive. But there is a place of hope and assistance where our horror is displaced by a feeling of surprise. Shattered bodies, physical destitution, men, women, and children who have lost limbs are being treated. Here in the orthopedic center, the heart of the Red Cross in Kabul, there is a friendly atmosphere, cheerful, even hopeful and lively. Alberto, the head of the clinic, thinks it is a miracle when a young boy, Sher Ahmad, walks back into life. We accompany Sher Ahmad as he journeys back to his small village in southern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan.

Germany 2010, 108 min
by Joachim Tschirner (UM WELT FILM)

The film accompanies the biggest clean-up operation in the history of uranium mining and takes the viewers to the big mines in Namibia, Australia and Canada. Uranium mining, the first link in the chain of nuclear development, has managed again and again to keep itself out of the public eye. A web of propaganda, disinformation and lies covers its 65-year history. The third largest uranium mine in the world was located in the East German provinces of Saxony and Thuringia. Operating until the Reuni fication, it had the code name WISMUT and supplied the Soviet Union exclusively with the much soughtafter strategic resource Yellow Cake. Until 1990 WISMUT supplied the Soviet Union with 220,000 tons of uranium. In absolute terms, this quantity was enough for the production of 32,000 Hiroshima bombs. For the last 20 years, WISMUT has been making a huge material and financial effort to come to terms with its past, which is an alarming present and future on other continents. For five years, the filmmakers accompanied the world’s largest sanitation project in the history of uranium mining. During that time the world market for uranium changed in a dramatic way. Uranium has advanced to become one of the most sought after resources in the world. While shooting this film, the price for uranium on the world market increased twenty times … WORLD SALES: HS Media Consult Wasenstr. 29 72135 Dettenhausen, Germany tel.: +49 (0) 7157-620008 info@hsmedia-consult.de http://www.hsmedia-consult.de http://www.umweltfilm.de

Germany 2009, 87 min
by Marian Kiss

They were heroes of a special kind. They came from the steppes, the sons of farmers, of factory floor women. Salt-of-the-earth, strapping young men, model husbands, who believed in communism with all their hearts. Bright futures lay ahead of them. In the name of the Intercosmos Programme they were about to conquer space. One perfect specimen of manhood from every communist nation. First the Czechoslovakian, followed by a Pole, an East-German, a Bulgarian, a Hungarian, a Vietnamese, a Rumanian, a Cuban, a Mongolian, and an Afghan cosmonaut. The second they touched down, they were treated like pop stars and worshipped as heroes. And today? What do the heroes of socialism do without socialism?

Germany 2009, 87 min
by Helga Reidemeister

Hossein and Shaima have loved each other since childhood. As teenagers they were separated by war. They meet again in Kabul in the 1990s. Poverty forces Hossein to fight in the war. A shell splinter leaves him a paraplegic. Shortly afterwards, Shaima is sold in marriage to a man 40 years her senior. Shaima, who is the man’s fourth wife, falls pregnant. But Shaima’s husband still owes half the dowry, and so her father brings her back into the constraining patriarchal fold of the family, where she lives today with her fiveyear- old daughter. This situation doesn’t prevent the two lovers from seeing each other as much as possible – even though this means going against their families’ hard and fast rules. They both dream of living together in peace. Caught on the horns of a dilemma, and in constant fear of revenge on the part of the male members of both families who adhere to the harsh tribal laws handed down from the Middle Ages, Hossein and Shaima struggle under the most difficult circumstances imaginable to hold on to their love. This film describes the infringement of a taboo, the outcome of which is still uncertain. In an environment where war and want have dealt heavy blows on compassion and humanity and the family is the only remaining social bond, the chances of personal happiness are very slim indeed.

Germany 2008
by Andrea Lammers

The sun rises fast here in Guatemala as the folks of "La Aurora - the Dawn of hope" prepare the first year anniversary of their community. Heavily armed soldiers enter the village, children come running. There had never seen such men in the refugee camps, where they grew up. Villagers gather, accuse the patrol of what the army did to their families a dozen of years before. And soon one of more than 600 massacres counted in this small country will take place, but also the beginning of something very new: The very first time survivors go to court, filing charges for "state crime". What they intend now are small steps on halfway to heaven.

Germany 2004, 93 min
by Helga Reidemeister

Helga Reidemeister portrays four women from Afghanistan—Jamila Mujahed, India—Arundhati Roy, Serbia—Stasa Zajovic and the USA—Sissy Farenthold, who demonstrate their opposition to nationalism and war.In TEXAS—KABUL director Helga Reidemeister shows four committed women, who do not tolerate war and don’t want to be silent about it.A political road movie, a journey around the planet, searching for meaning in times of war, and a journey into the own past. The director, worried by the announcement of the wars following the tragedy of September 11th in New York, seeks allies to act prudently in the panic erupted.She finds four women in four different countries of the world. Arundhati Roy, from New Delhi, world famous writer of the novel “The God of Small Things” is considered to be “the voice of the third world” and a militant opponent of globalization.Stasa Zajovic, from Belgrade, a founder of the pacifist group “Women in Black”, was active in resistance against the Milosevic dictatorship. She was awarded with the „Millennium Peace Prize“ of the UN in 2000.Jamila Mujahed has experienced 23 years of war in Kabul. She is the editor of “Malalai”, the only women’s magazine in Afghanistan. In 2004 she was awarded with the Johann-Philipp Palm Preis for the freedom of expression and freedom of press.Sissy Farenthold, law professor from Texas, former Member of Parliament and candidate for the post of Gouverneur, worked as a human rights observer for the UN. She is now preparing a tribunal for Iraq war.