Films by Sebastian Winkels

Germany 2023, 239 min
by Julian Vogel

Munich 2016, Halle 2019 and Hanau 2020.Three right-wing extremist attacks by so-called 'lone wolves': Alleged lone perpetrators who apparently radicalised themselves on the internet without being part of classic extremist structures and suddenly struck in public spaces.These are stories that now dominate the headlines: According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, right-wing terror is currently considered the greatest threat to democracy in Germany.And this despite the fact that until recently such perpetrators were often classified as mentally ill, 'confused' lone perpetrators and thus denied their racism. These times are over: after the attack in Hanau, Frank Walter Steinmeier spoke of an 'attack on all of us'. But who are 'all of us'? The documentary EINZELTÄTER (Lone Perpetrator) takes the perspective of the people whose relatives were actually the target of the attacks and whose lives will never be the same again.

Germany 2021, 98 min
by Daniela Abke

Paris, Belleville: a neighbourhood that epitomises migration, music and struggle. At the corner of Rue des Envierges echoes of the Paris Commune of 1871 resonate, as neighbours and strangers alike sing old French popular songs together at Le Vieux Belleville, one of the city's last remaining café musettes. An ensemble of truly emblematic characters pays tribute to the French revolutionary spirit - echoes of a bygone era perhaps, yet radically fresh. with Joseph Pantaleo, Lucio Urtubia, Minelle Guy, Riton la Manivelle, Robert Bober, S.C. Turne

Germany 2019, 91 min
by Ines Johnson-Spain

Imagine that your parents are white but your skin colour is dark and they tell you that 's pure coincidence. This is what happened to a girl in East Berlin in the 1960s. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Here the East German woman Sigrid falls in love with Lucien from Togo and gets pregnant. But she is already married to Armin. The child is filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. Meeting her stepfather Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents and the surroundings had developed. In an intimate portrayal but also critical exploration she brings together painful and confusing childhood memories with matter-of-fact accounts that testify a culture of rejection and tight-lipped denial. Yet, the movingly warm encounters with her Togolese family develop Becoming Black also into a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, seen from a very personal perspective.

Germany 2017, 81 min
by Sebastian Winkels

Talking Money is an observational documentary shot at bank consultation tables all over the world. Weaving stories from eight countries into one global money conversation, it virtually transforms the cinema into a bank. Purely experiential!Who are we when we talk about money?Intimate conversations in an impersonal place: from Bolivia to Pakistan, Benin to Switzerland, men and women sit down across from their neighborhood bankers to discuss the intimacies of their financial lives. Far from the glamour of distant Wall Street, this is the reality of personal banking, where one’s life problems are a matter of business.In fifteen spontaneously recorded encounters, the bank table turns into a stage for confessions and masquerades, where consultants and clients try their best to look solid and trustworthy. Filming entirely from the bank’s side of the table, Sebastian Winkels offers the audience a place in a bizarre power play, exploring a complicated relation called ’money’.A multi-voiced comment on capitalism that reveals how the invisible power of money works on all of us, no matter who and where we are.

Germany 2015, 112 min
by Simon Brückner

The psychologist Peter Brückner has been a lot of things in his life: a 'half-Jew' and a runaway, an underground activist and a Wehrmacht soldier, a communist with party-ban, a father and a family refugee, a democrat and an enemy of the constitution, last but not least the first tenured university professor banned from teaching. He died in 1982 hailed by the protest generation of 1968 as their beloved scholar. His heritage includes the headstrong social psychology of liberation. At the time of his death, his youngest son Simon was four years old. Thirty years later, Simon, now a filmmaker, embarks on a journey to get to know his father and he discovers a personality with multiple secrets.

Germany 2015, 86 min
by Jana Kalms, Piet Stolz, Sebastian Winkels

Germany 2013, 85 min
by Markus CM Schmidt

European bluefin tuna can grow to the size of a passenger them migrate from the Atlantic to spawning grounds in the Mediterranean. Fact is that tuna stocks face collapse. Yet they are still being fished during spawning season. The fishermen, too, are facing extinction: They can only service the loan debt on their boats by continuing to fish. While some have used questionable means to secure fishing licenses for still plentiful Libyan waters, the rest are left to trawl the already overfished areas. The Mediterranean fishermen’s desperate fight for survival is coming to a head. In the intense images the film tells a parable of hope, disillusionment and desperation. It exposes the mechanisms of a value chain, which is destroying its own basis with a strategy based on shortsighted greed. In the end both the fish and the people loose.