Films by Manuel Stettner

2021, 88 min
by Sobo Swobodnik

Lotte Ingrisch, born in 1930 in Austria, was the first hippie, the first Green, a prophet of the Age of Aquarius, of cyberspace culture and - without being a feminist herself - a champion of the total change of roles for women. The film tries to get closer to this idiosyncratic and unique personality, both cinematically and aurally.with Lotte Ingrisch, Johanna Klug, Kathrin Angerer, Lars Rudolph, Ingrid Altermann, Christine Weber, Magdaléna Jánosová, Prof. Dr. Manfred Schmid and Unit

Germany 2020, 79 min
by Sobo Swobodnik

The traces of what we were in our childhood of how we got socialized, keep affecting our adult age, even if the circumstances of life are completely different now and we believe, that we’ve settled with the past. This ist why the return to our environment of origin, from where we’ve emerged and from which we departed, is always and at the sam time, a turning-back, a retrospective, a reencounter with our own self – preserved, as well as denied. Then something enters our consciousness, of which we would have liked to believe we’d been liberated from, but which unmistakably structures our own personality: the discomfort of pertaining to two different worlds, lying almost irreconcilably far from each other and yet coexisting in every aspect of our being."Class Struggle - Portrait of a Social Origin" sets out to investigate these worlds, illustrating, with the biography of the film director and by means of text quotes ranging from Didier Eribon to Annie Ernaux, the social portrait of an origin, which is representative and exemplary for many who come from the lower strata of society. A theses-proposing movie on class problematics. A hybrid documentary in which, similar to "Brinkmanns Zorn", "Herr von Bohlen" or "All these sleepless nights", the boundaries to the fictional are blurred.

Germany 2019, 86 min
by Sobo Swobodnik

The diagnosis: an aneurysm in the brain. Then follow two nightmarish months during which we accompany the filmmaker. An essayistic audio-visual collage, in which Sobo Swobodnik shows us what it means to live with a potentially fatal condition.

2019, 88 min
by Sobo Swobodnik

Thomas Walter was part of the Berlin autonomous scene. In 1995 he and two co-perpetrators were accused of having attempted an arson attack on an uninhabited deportation prison in Berlin-Grünau which was prevented by the police. Arrest warrants for the three as members of a leftist terrorist association are still valid today. They went underground for decades. It is only in 2017 that Walter contacts his family in Germany again – from Venezuela, where he has applied for asylum.Thomas Walter is also a relative of the Berlin filmmaker Sobo Swobodnik, who travels with a camera to the Andes in 2019 to meet the former autonomist in his home surrounded by vegetable gardens. This is where he is working on a music project with the Berlin singer Pablo Charlemoine aka Mal Élevé in an improvised studio in the kitchen. There’s also an extensive interview in which Walter, in Baden dialect, talks remarkably frankly (and self-righteously) about attitudes and events then and now. His former enthusiasm for the Chavist project has long since given way to criticism, but his anarchist ideals are still there. A film that offers a rare insight into a world usually invisible due to the pressure of legal persecution, with a soundtrack featuring the political and activist songs of Walter & Co. (DOK Leipzig, Silvia Hallensleben)