Films by Martin Roelly

2021, 89 min
by Laurentia Genske, Robin Humboldt

Two Syrian sisters, on the verge of adulthood and trans *, are looking to find their way in their new home-country Germany. This film not only tells the moving story of a family that sticks together despite all hardships, but also poses the question of one's own identity. A coming-of-age documentary about the search for one's individual place in society.

2021, 85 min
by Aicha Macky

The wind-swept town of Zinder in the heart of the Sahel region of Niger is a place travellers only pass through.Kara-Kara, the former lepers’ quarter, is the pariahs’ district of this town. Gangs referred to as the "Palais” have sprung up in this area and are spreading their influence throughout the town. Obsessed by a culture of bodybuilding and violence, the gang members induce fear in the population.Outside the moments spent together in a body-building camp, some of them follow the path that will lead them to a life of crime and prison or a violent death, others strive to pull themselves out of the rut they find themselves in. This is the case for Siniya, Bawo and Ramsess, whom the director, originally from Zinder, has succeeded in filming up close to reveal to us their survival strategies. By following them in their daily lives divided between their gang, their family and fending for themselves, she gives us a sense of their desire to break free from the cycle of violence which has built their identities. (andanafilms)

Switzerland, Germany, Georgia 2021, 91 min
by Salomé Jashi

The opening shot of filmmaker Salomé Jashi’s striking environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea. Its destination lies within a garden countless miles away, privately owned by a wealthy and anonymous man whose passion resides in the removal, and subsequent replanting, of foreign trees into his own man-made Eden.With astonishing cinematic style,Taming the Garden tracks the surreal uprooting of ancient trees from their Georgian locales. With each removal, tensions flare between workers and villagers. Some see financial incentives—new roads, handsome fees—while others angrily mourn the loss of what was assumed an immovable monolith of their town’s collective history and memory. With a steady and shrewdly observant eye, Jashi documents a single man’s power over Earth’s natural gardens: how majestic living artifacts of a country’s identity can so effortlessly become uprooted by individuals with no connection to the nature they now claim as their own.

Germany 2020, 81 min
by Valentin Riedl

Carlotta cannot recognize faces, not even her own. For her, human faces are no bastion of trust, but places of fear and confusion. She is one of the 1% of all people whose part of the brain responsible for facial recognition does not work properly. With his film LOST IN FACE, neuroscientist Valentin Riedl travels through Carlotta’s universe, full of anthropomorphic animals, lucid dreams and bumpy false paths. He peels back her charming, idiosyncratic solutions that she employs to be able to join the masses of human conformity, until she one day decides to build a ship and leave her fellow humans. Her never-ending search for answers leads her to art—and thus an avenue to her own face and back to humanity. “As a neuroscientist and filmartist, Valentin merges abstract science with the artistic form of film to open a new world to the spectator” Wim Wenders

Romania, Germany, Finland 2020, 86 min
by Radu Ciorniciuc

For two decades, the Enache family—nine kids and their parents—lived in a shack in the wilderness of Bucharest Delta: an abandoned water reservoir, one of the biggest urban natural reservations in the world, with lakes and hundreds of species of animals and rare plants. When the authorities decide to claim back this rare urban ecosystem, the Enache family is evicted and told to resettle in the city—a reality they know nothing about. Kids that used to spend their days in nature have to learn about city life, go to school instead of swimming in the lake, and swap their fishing rods for mobile phones. Their identity has been questioned and transformed, along with their sense of freedom and family ties.Radu Ciorniciuc’s heartbreaking debut is a thoughtful study of gentrification, seen through the eyes of a family trying to adapt to the new life they never asked for. Is it better to go back to their “paradise lost,” with its life free yet harsh, or to become part of the society that offers comforts but comes with pressures and conflict? [Sundance]

Switzerland, Germany, Polen 2020, 94 min
by Eliza Kubarska

When a Sherpa family is asked by a group of westerners to lead a trek up the never-conquered east wall of the imposing Kumbhakarna Mountain in Nepal, they’re confronted with a dilemma. Not only is the summit reputed to be more challenging than Mount Everest, but according to the local Kirant religion, it’s a sacred mountain that is not supposed to be ascended. While the father would like to earn the money necessary for his son’s education, the mother, a fierce woman who supports her boy’s dream of becoming a doctor, is adamant that they shouldn’t hike God’s body. Director Eliza Kubarska follows the expedition after the family agrees to guide the three foreigners, negotiating as best they can the pressure to finish the climb, the dangerous conditions and their own religious beliefs. Herself an experienced alpinist, Kubarska captures breathtaking images of the majestic landscape, honouring the spiritual dimension of the environment. (Charlotte Selb)„Kubarska knows that the grandeur of the mountain is but a hill of beans compared to the human drama in the camp. The film is all the better for it.“ Pat Mullen, Point of View Magazine

2019, 84 min
by Pia Hellenthal

"I dedicate my life to showing the world that one can pretend to be whoever they want." Eva, 25 - drifter, Berliner, pet-owner, poet, sex worker, virgo, recovering addict, housewife, feminist, model – declared privacy an outdated concept at the age of 14. This is the tale of a young woman growing up in the age of the internet, turning the search for oneself into a public spectacle, challenging you on what a woman 'should be'. Through her fragmented personalities you see the emergence of a generation, in which the concept of a fxed identity has grown old. A portrait of modern existence.

Germany 2019, 106 min
by Julia Horn

Markus Becker is hit by a car and falls into a coma. The doctors don't believe the 45-year-old will survive the next five to ten days and his father begins making funeral arrangements. Markus' brother Michael refuses to accept this fate. With an unwavering perseverance, creative ideas and humour, Michael manages to get his brother out of the vegetative state. For ten years filmmaker Julia Horn accompanied the two brothers with sensitivity and persistence and was also there do document the moment, when Michael almost loses his own life due to exhaustion. Dear Brother is a love story, a film about what we are willing to do for love and a film about our idea of what it means to be human.

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)

Germany 2019, 94 min
by Christoph Hübner, Gabriele Voss

AFTERMATH tells the story of three former youth talents of the German football club Borussia Dortmund.The film encompasses a trilogy shot across 20 years, portraying the end of their career and asks the questions: what was, what is, what comes next?

Germany, Austria 2019, 83 min
by Gesa Hollerbach

The last school has shut its doors, every other house is empty, there are only rapeseed fields as far as the eye can see. The last holdovers in the country are faced with the decision: stay or go?  "All for the Countryside" traces a host of societal phenomena that are caused by changing dynamics in rural areas and follows four individuals over the course of several years, each of whom give unexpected impulses to life on the countryside. The quartet consists of a mayor who's stuck between the front lines when parents resort to illegal protest classes to prevent the closing of the local middle school; a farmer who enters the political sector and tries to exercise political pressure in the EU parliament against the practice of land concentration in Europe; and an astronomer who together with a local restaurant owner fights for the protection of our natural skies by attempting to obtain UNESCO status for an unknown village. While each of the quartet has completely different backgrounds, they are united in their strong belief in the power of the individual and the courage to enter uncharted territory with their actions. The film dives deep into their personal microcosms and shows what can be done to prevent the eradication of the European countryside. The story is a profoundly European one, as all across Europe people living in the countryside are faced with similar challenges

2019, 85 min
by John David Seidler

In 1981 Taiwan hosted its first Women's World Cup, at a time when the German Football Association did not promote but rather grudgingly tolerated women's football – in Germany it was officially banned until 1970.Since establishing a women's national team was of no interest to the German Football Association, the invitation to the Women’s World Cup in Taipei went straight to the reigning club champions SSG 09 Bergisch Gladbach. In the film the former players talk about the absurd conditions in which they had to fight for their great dream of playing football – against all odds and with a fair dose of humour. Without any support from the German Football Association they played the match of their lives in front of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic spectators in the World Cup stadiums and live on Taiwanese television. Accompanied by historical footage – testimonies of a men's world that today seem all the more anachronistic – WE WANTED MORE (DAS WUNDER VON TAIPEH) tells a football story that is about much more than sporting success, namely equality and recognition.

Germany 2012, 74 min
by Carolin Genreith

Getting old is nasty. Getting old makes you hot and cold. Getting old gives you wrinkles and sagging breasts. When a woman’s menopause begins, she stops looking in the mirror; libido and beauty will soon become things of the past. All you can do is accept the course of time, hide your extra padding under a big sweater and prepare for your new role as a grannyto-be. At least that’s what 28-year-old director Carolin Genreith is absolutely convinced of. She is all the more shocked when, in the middle of her quarter-life crisis, she returns to her home in the rural Northern Eifel region and discovers her mother's new hobby: belly dancing! Once a week, her mother and her friends unshamefully strip off their clothes, put on colourful costumes and get wild. They move their hips in circles, shake their breasts und roll their bellies - they’re even overflowing with self-confidence! All that at an age when women usually buy Nordic walking poles and girdles. From a neurotic perspective of her own generation, director Carolin Genreith takes a closer look at her mother’s life as well as that of two of her friends and gains insight into three different ways of living and aging. DANCING WITH BELLIES is a story about the attempt to escape when you’re stuck in a rut. It’s about the difficulties during menopause and about the art of chasing away the fear of aging with a skilled shake of the hip - at least for a while…