Films by Oliver Prasnikar

Germany 2023, 90 min
by Sabine Michel

Petry, Schwesig, Magwas and Domscheit-Berg: four female politicians with their roots in the East on the reunification of Germany and the role of women.Symbolic: on the election campaign stand in front of the Mäc Geiz discount store, the left-wing politician Anke Domscheit-Berg discusses the differences in pay between East and West Germany with passers-by – more than thirty years after reunification. She is one of four female politicians with East German backgrounds portrayed in the film. Alongside her, Manuela Schwesig, Yvonne Magwas and Frauke Petry analyse German history – and their own life stories. [38 DOK.fest München, Anka Klauck]

Germany 2019, 98 min
by Grit Lemke

"My swing is in an enchanted garden, behind the railway embankment. Up in the air, on my swing, I see the trains, squeaking past day and night shedding black dust. They come out of the huge holes that gape between our villages. As a child, I think the whole world looks like this: Holes, with villages between, my swing in the middle. And the trains. They're coal trains." Gerhard Gundermann (1955–1998), singer-songwriter, poet and excavator operator in the Lusatian brown coal mines. In this region, global problems are condensed on a local level as if by a burning glass – from structural change to climate crisis. Mostly unpublished archive material and Gundermann’s songs enter into a dialogue with observations and conversations in his 'district', accompanied by the voice-over of the director, who is no less deeply rooted in the coal mining district. Home and its destruction through strip mining, utopian ideas and the question of individual responsibility run through the songs, as do their consequences for gainful employment and the environment at the end of the industrial age. And they are more topical than ever today: "Where my swing stood, then your digger, is now a lake." (DOK Leipzig, Frederik Lang)