Films by Thomas Plenert

Germany 2021, 94 min
by Helke Misselwitz

The paintings of the artist Güler Yücel tell about weddings and funerals, of almond blossom and olive harvest, of her husband, the poet, and of herself, her love of life and wisdom. “I can’t paint anything that I have not seen”, says Güler Yücel. She is a chronicler and a prophetess, because her pictures describe the cycle of life, which we find again and again in everyday life: on the Turkish peninsula of Datça, over which the wind of two seas blows and women are in charge.

Germany 2019, 79 min
by Annekatrin Hendel

Sven Marquardt might be the most famous bouncer worldwide. But beside standing in front of the legendary techno club Berghain in Berlin, he is also a well-known and skilled photographer. Long before the Berlin Wall came down, Marquardt portrayed the subcultural East-Berlin scene. His black and white photography illustrates it as voluptuous, laid-back, dirty and existential. Even if shot by daylight, his work is permeated by darkness, ecstasy and night.with: Sven Marquardt, Dominique Hollenstein und Robert Paris

Germany 2013, 120 min
by Volker Koepp

There are two contrasting ways to describe Sarmatia: as a region on the edge of the known world – that's how the old Greeks saw it -, or as the part of Europe where the once carefully measured geographical centre of the continent is. However, you will probably look in vain for Sarmatia in your school atlas, it doesn’t exist as an administrative unit, and Google Maps won't help either. Yet Sarmatia is not a chimera. Volker Koepp travelled there for his new film, generously allowing us to share his impressions and encounters in a both unknown and nearby region between Lithuania and Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland, which borders on the Baltic in the North and the Black Sea in the South. This historic landscape has long made frequent appearances in his work, at least since 1972, when he made 'Grüße aus Sarmatien für den Dichter Johannes Bobrowski' (Greetings from Sarmatia for the Poet Johannes Bobrowski). Like Bobrowski, Volker Koepp recognises it as "that dreamland where all nations and religious would find their place if history had not ploughed it all up over and over again". The rifts left by all this, especially in the people who live there, and how these people still manage to shine from inside, is beautifully depicted here. (DOKLeipzig/Ralph Eue)

Germany 2012, 90 min
by div

GOLDRUSH tells the story of the Treuhandanstalt - the most expensive experiment and the greatest white-collar-crime since Worldwar II. It’s a film about greed as the driving force of economic development. The trust agency 'Treuhand' was established to privatise the state owned enterprises of the GDR. Never before had there been an enterprise like the Treuhand that temporarily ran and speedily privatised 8,500 companies. With four million jobs at stake in East Germany, this was a novel and unique experiment and one under enormous pressure of time. It was doomed to fail. Over three million jobs were lost and 4.000 companies were closed. The Treuhand existed for 30 months. In this time it lost 250 million Marks a day - in the name of the Federal Republic. Furthermore, the Treuhand was defrauded out of at least 20 billion Marks. The scandal has never been entirely resolved and most of the perpetrators escaped prosecution or were never impeached. GOLDRUSH is not a historical piece - it is a film about the limitations of the social consensus. The film does not accuse, does not judge. It simply insists on the need to ask questions, even if the answers are not always conclusive.