Films by Roman Pogorzelski

Germany 2024, 91 min
by Daniel Abma

When parents can no longer fulfil their duty of care, the children’s world often falls apart. Nothing stays as it was. Suddenly it is no longer mum or dad who are in charge but the youth welfare system. Daniel Abma followed a youth housing group in a rural area over several years, showing professional educators who want to give five boys between the ages of seven and fourteen what they need most urgently, day by day: security, orientation, a home.The documentary focus is not on the children but on those who take the parents’ place. They sometimes remind us of Don Quixote tilting at the windmills, for there is a diffusion of responsibility between school, youth welfare services, and absent mothers and fathers. Words fail when adults do not keep appointments, when those in charge capitulate in the face of racist bullying and propose some “time out” – for the bullied boy – in a psychiatric facility. It would be easy to denounce these mechanisms, but that is not the point Daniel Abma wants to make. His observation, both emphatic and reserved, looks questioningly into the gaps in the system – with those who are in danger of falling through and those who try to fill them with affection. He makes us suspect that the answer is not to close all the system’s gaps. It is people who are there for other people and take responsibility. [67 DOK Leipzig, Luc-Carolin Ziemann]

Germany 2022, 85 min
by Maksym Melnyk

Somewhere in the Carpathians between Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland lies the village of Stuzhytsia. In Ukrainian the name of the village means „cold place". The film tells the stories of three women: the farmer Hanna, the post woman Maria and the biologist Nelya. Surrounded by mountains they cope with social reality and loneliness. The colder the Carpathian winter gets, the more human warmth the film team finds. The film portrays an unknown place in the middle of Europe, where people have to decide daily between leaving and staying.

Germany 2022, 83 min
by Sönje Storm

Birds, bugs and butterflies: The collection of northern German farmer and photographer Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt (1882 -1940) is odd and a little bit uncanny. The documentary Dead Birds Flying High explores the quiet eccentric’s life and work. In 1919 he began to photograph the local flora and fauna and started to observe the extinction of species. In a northern German attic: boxes of pinned butterflies, carefully hand-coloured photographs of the local flora and fauna, hundreds of stuffed and dusty birds – Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt (1882–1940) did a great job. His collections echo a present that doesn’t exist anymore. And yet all signs of an ecological crisis can be found buried in them.Dead or alive? There is an uncanny element in Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt’s photos: One can’t always be sure whether the animal captured in the frame is the result of hours of waiting or just a specimen staged to look lifelike. The ripples around the duck on the pond are missing, the bird of prey looks suspiciously calm directly into the lens. Mahrt crossed borders. He sacrificed his duties as a farmer to the urge to document natural environments we hardly find in nature today. Ancient forests, enchanted moors, macro views of fat, colourful caterpillars – almost magical images that make one sad in view of a variety irretrievably lost. His great-granddaughter Sönje Storm has the quiet eccentric’s estate analysed by experts, shows peat cutters, extinct species and a changing countryside. An exceedingly stimulating excursion, congenially accompanied by the scurrilous electronica sounds of Dominik Eulberg and Bertram Denzel. [65 DOK Leipzig, Carolin Weidner]With: Esther Ruelfs, Sven Schumacher, Martin Husemann, Detlef Kolligs, Matthias Preuß, Wolfgang Scharenberg, Werner David, Hans Hermann Storm, Wolfgang Rüther

2020, 63 min
by Max Benyo

The young woman Silvia Sempeyu belongs to the Maasai tribe and lives in southern Kenya, near the Amboseli National Park. With her five children, she lives in a small wooden house near the border town of Loitokitok, right on the border with Tanzania. Silvia lives in the heart of the „Maasailand", which extends across the borders of East Africa via the Amboseli National Park. She takes a motorcycle taxi to the more remote places in her home country to talk to young women who have become pregnant, have been raped or talk to the older women and explains why the circumcision of their daughters and granddaughters is dangerous for the girls. It calls on like-minded people to defend themselves against the patriarchy, to become independent and independent of men and to invoke state women's rights. Silvia Sempeyu repeatedly encounters resistance, she is laughed at and some people - including women - react aggressively to their ideas and demands.Her family was attacked several times, she even had to fear for her own life, and yet she continues to fight.

Germany 2020, 63 min
by Maxim Melnyk

Two villages with the same name: Schönborn. One located in Transcarpathia in Ukraine, the other one in Brandenburg in Germany. They are both struggling to find their identity, almost 30 years after the fall of communism in Germany and the founding of independent Ukraine. The film accompanies some of the inhabitants for two years and tells the story of getting to know each other: the two Schönborns get closer - first in letters, then in reality.

Germany 2018, 90 min
by Lilian Nix

KINDSEIN - Unadulterated is a visually stunning invitation to enter the lives of KURUMI (8), JORGITO (8), SEAN (6) and REKHA (6). These four kids from different countries around the globe inspire to see life through the eyes of a child again. Despite being confronted with touching personal highs and lows, with their point of view they manage to see magic in everyday life, and let solutions to humankind's big issues seem quite obvious.  This film is a visually stunning invitation to see life through the eyes of a child again and to enter the worlds of four kids from different countries around the globe.