Films by Simon Bastian

Germany 2024, 24 min
by Rebecca Blöcher

My mother has led a very unorthodox life, which has taken her both to palaces and under bridges. She lived in her small car for over 10 years until she could no longer walk and the car gave up right after that. [Rebecca Blöcher]The mother of animation director Rebecca Blöcher didn’t want to live an ordinary life. She wanted 'something more,' she explains in this stop-motion film. The people around her didn’t understand—in a letter written in 1968, a girlfriend criticizes her for going out on her

2023, 95 min
by Thorsten Ernst, Tobias Lickes

Four athletes from various countries live with different intellectual disabilities. Timo from Germany plays tennis with his sister. Toivo and Roope are from Finland and sail together as a unified team. Uyangaa from Mongolia wants to participate with her volleyball team, and Mary Stella from Kenya is competing to qualify with her football team.Being 'special' seems less of a challenge since they also have to cope with the troubles of growing up, finding true friendship, and figuring out what life

Germany, France 2022, 105 min
by Philip Scheffner

A bus stop, a town square, a few blocks of houses in the suburb of a small French town, in Chatellerault. Zohra Hamadi, an Algerian citizen, can stand upright thanks to several metal rods, and now seems free of her debilitating scoliosis – the very reason for her immigration to France. By a twist of fate, this same recovery leads to her residence permit being revoked by the French State: she must consequently disappear, become invisible and inaudible. Choosing to make what he describes as State-

Germany 2021, 98 min
by Antje Hubert

What do we need for a good life? Not all that much, says the owner of a village shop in Germany’s far north. Food and drink, and above all, the freedom to take your time for whatever it is you are doing at a given moment. A journey across the countryside in search of an answer to the question of what, and how much, we really need.

Germany 2021, 90 min
by Andrei Schwartz

The film covers the double life of a group of Roma who have been shuttling between Hamburg and their Romanian village for years. They earn their meagre income through begging and spend nights in improvised shacks alongside train tracks or in the thickets of public parks. Four to five times a year they return home to Nămăiesti, a village about 100 km west of Bucharest, to take care of their children. Only Maria and Țirloi managed to build a bit of normality for themselves in Hamburg; they have a

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

Germany 2020, 67 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed, Amel Alzakout

“I see everything,” she says, as if it was a curse. Brilliant sunshine, clear blue skies. The sea is calm, framed by a piece of railing. Buzzing voices. A peaceful moment if it weren’t for the fact that the sea is standing upright, vertical, like a waterfall. A rush of images, twirling, upside down, jolting. People in the boat, in the water, screams, life jackets, emergency whistles. Fluorescent orange, geometrical shapes cast by the sun.There’s no horizon any more, no sky, no up or down, only d

Germany, Iran 2019, 59 min
by Faezeh Nikoozad

Many years after the loss of her parents during childhood, Faezeh turns to the camera to revisit and rediscover her past. For the first time, in fuzzy home videos, she notices the presence of a strange man in her family. Seeing herself as a child, embracing the man's open arms instead of her own father's, she faces the mystery of the man and her family. Who is the mysterious figure who's mostly behind the camera? How did he became a member of the family? Why does no one in the family want to tal

Germany 2018, 17 min
by Alex Gerbaulet

Two newspaper articles, ten years apart, two different women, the same wording. In 2001 the “Göttinger Zeitung” wrote that Margit (69) had lived a secluded life as an inconspicuous woman. In 2011 the “Hamburger Abendblatt” stated that Irina (65) had lived in seclusion, a non-descript woman. Up to the moment of their appearance in these newspaper lines, both women were invisible, forcefully concealed by their roles as wives and homemakers. Only for a brief moment did they claim visibility. Throug

Germany 2018, 5 min
by Valentin Riedl, Frederic Schuld

When Carlotta looks in the mirror, she doesn't recognize the image reflected back at her. This beautifully animated portrait explores the confusion that face blindness causes for a young child trying to make sense of her world, and ultimately, how this rare neurological condition gave Carlotta the gift of artistic expression. (hotDOCS, Eileen Arandiga)