Films by Thomas Tielsch

Austria, Germany, Romania 2020, 98 min
by Monica Lazurean-Gorgan, Michaela Kirst, Ebba Sinzinger

Illegal logging is a global business worth billions. Alexander von Bismarck, descendant of the Iron Chancellor and head of the Environmental Investigation Agency in Washington D.C., successfully pursues the machinations of the timber mafia worldwide – with dyed hair, a concealed camera and sound recording equipment. His primary concern isn't to expose a scandalous situation, but rather to promote a change in the consciousness of politics and civil society and to bring about a new code of conduct for the global economy and consumers. WOOD is an environmental thriller that draws its tension from sad everyday reality. (624 Zeichen, Magnetfilm)"Environmental activism meets international espionage in docu-thriller!" Pat Mullen, POV

2018, 88 min
by Thomas Tielsch

They live at the fringes of the known world, the last indigenous communities – far away from civilisation but affected by its consequences nonetheless. The photographer Markus Mauthe visited these last indigenous peoples to capture the inherent beauty of their cultures, before they too fall victim to ever-advancing globalisation. The journey leads from South Sudan and Ethiopia to Malay sea nomads and Brazilian Indians in Mato Grosso, who have started to defend themselves against the destruction of their natural habitat.

2018, 91 min
by Bettina Borgfeld

Two billionaire brothers buy themselves into the island of Sark, where only 600 inhabitants live - till then in harmony with nature and with a strong sense of community.  A battle begins that unfolds a conflict in an idyllic setting. The brothers remain phantoms in the film as they never enter the battlefield themselves.

2018, 90 min
by Boris Missirkov, Georgi Bogdanov

PALACE FOR THE PEOPLE tells the stories of the most emblematic four buildings of socialist times - highly representative for the epoch and witnessing the historical turbulence in Eastern Europe in the second half of the XX century. The National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Moscow State University, Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Palace of Serbia in Belgrade, Palace of the Republic in Berlin are unique architectural creatures made with a lot of courage and a bit of lunacy to remind the people there was an ultimate power and brighter future. Each one is the tallest, the largest, has the biggest clock on Earth, or the most advanced technology of its time. They were the most grandiose enterprises in a time when collective good was the major state policy. Now that socialism is over it's time to go back and reveal their hidden secrets. The film takes a snapshot of the palaces today, as seen through the eyes of people related to them - their architects, former and current directors, ordinary people who worked in them.Episode 1: Moscow: Moscow State UniversityEpisode 2: Belgrade: Palace of SerbiaEpisode 3: Sofia: National Palace of CultureEpisode 4: Bucharest: Palace of the Parliament

Germany 2017, 90 min
by Niels-Christian Bolbrinker, Thomas Tielsch

The film describes the fascinating story of the Bauhaus as statement, failure and renewal of a social utopia. And it tells of artists, scientists and architects today, who, in their examinations of current challenges also relate to the Bauhaus. That way, the story of this unfinished utopian project with its manifold exciting cross-references unfolds before our eyes while always keeping in touch with the questions still topical today: How do we want to live, where do we want to go?

Germany 2014, 86 min
by Andre Siegers

Alfred D. is fond of travelling, a veritable collector of countries. While on his travels, he films the world and himself. Alfred D. is a member of the Social Democratic Party too and represented the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Nepal, Warsaw and elsewhere during the 90s, carrying out democratisation campaigns and making educational films about the role of money in market economies. He also took acting lessons, reported on the Berlinale for a Swabian newspaper and ran for office in the 2009 European elections. He’s never without his camera. Alfred in the Libyan desert, Alfred talking to former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Alfred with his terminally ill girlfriend, Alfred in the bath, Alfred with elephants in South Africa – in the provinces and in faraway lands, an advocate of different worldviews, sporadically asking what it all means. Madness? Normality? The political establishment is one big adventure. Slotting selected footage shot by this avid amateur filmmaker into a frame story about Alfred disappearing into the Arctic ice and accompanied by fictitious letters in voiceover, this cannily edited film sets out on an expedition of its own: into the realm of German mores.

Germany 2013, 85 min
by Niels-Christian Bolbrinker

Ever since radio and television were invented, paranoid people have been startling us with their detailed descriptions of imaginary technical apparatus, which, according to their theories, is being employed for surveillance and manipulation purposes. At the same time, however, this kind of technology was, in fact, being researched and built. This film is about the interplay between madness and method.

Germany 2010, 89 min
by Jan Peters

When Jan Peters' girlfriend accidently takes his wallet on a trip to foreign climes, she leaves the filmmaker standing in Frankfurt Airport without a penny to his name. The only capital he possesses is a group ticket for the public transport system. After hearing about people who supplement their inadequate incomes by “escorting” groups of tourists across the city, Mr. Peters decides to apply the same method to his own situation. The filmmaker starts a business as an "independent travel escort" and enters an obscure world of supplementary jobs and adventurous business models. During his trips he encounters troubled, laden, indifferent and optimistic souls, as well as those trying to cast off their abject yoke with courage, solidarity and creativity. The audience is confronted with the demise of familiar employment structures and is introduced to concepts designed for a future without full employment..

Germany 2010, 80 min
by Jörg Haaßengier, Jürgen Brügger

The film takes us on a journey through urban periphery, which, despite being right on our doorstep, is entirely unfamiliar territory for most of us. Think of the late afternoon drive to IKEA. It is a journey through a characterless and anonymous landscape that appears to express nothing whatsoever. It is as if we had just parked the car on the hard shoulder, climbed over the barrier and fought our way through the brambles to the white areas on our mental street map. The alleged no-man’s land between dual carriageways, business parks, wastelands, flooded quarries and disused railway junctions is inhabited by people who have claimed this territory for themselves, in order to create their own dominion – like archipelagos in an almost incomprehensible void on the borders of the city, liberated spaces full of passion and extraordinary plans.

Germany 2009, 93 min
by Vadim Jendreyko

Swetlana Geier is considered the greatest translator of Russian literature into German. She has just concluded her lifework for Zurich’s Ammann publishing house - completing new translations Dostoyevsky’s five great novels - known as the five elephants. Her work is characterised by a great and sensual feeling for language and an uncompromising respect for the writers she translates. Her life has been overshadowed by Europe’s varied history. Together with the film director, the eighty-five-year old woman is making her first trip from her chosen home in Germany back to the places of her childhood in the Ukraine. The film interweaves the story of Swetlana Geier’s life with her literary work and traces the secret of this inexhaustibly hard-working woman. It tells of great suffering, silent helpers and unhoped-for chances – and a love of language that outshines all else. Distribution Switzerland Cineworx Clarastr. 48 4001 Basel, Switzerland tel +41-61 261 63 70 http://www.cineworx.ch

Germany 2009
by Christian Klinger, Thomas Tielsch

The American Jock Sturges is internationally considered one of the most important photographers working in portraiture. His enduring theme is girls from childhood and puberty up to early adulthood. The state of nudity that Jock Sturges photographs is not the nudity of being unclothed. His models are not disrobed; Sturges shows nakedness as a natural state. This is why he predominantly takes photographs where nudity might be called a natural condition: on the nudist beaches of Europe. Jock Sturges spends his summers here, has known many of his models and their families for years, and his photos are born of this intimacy. But although Jock Sturges pursues a classical aesthetic of beauty in his pictures, his work is nonetheless controversial since it touches upon a taboo subject: the erotic aura that children and teenagers sometimes exude. For this reason, Sturges has been charged in the USA as a child-pornographer, though not convicted, and in Europe, too, there have been problems when his pictures have been exhibited. A film about the beauty and the moral values we have within us. Featuring Jock Sturges, Carla van de Puttelaar and Jean-Christophe Ammann.

Germany 2008, 65 min
by Janek Romero

Figures disguised as comic-book heroes rob delis and distribute their plunder to kindergartens; a student holding down three part-time jobs empties the rubbish bin from the bio-supermarket so as to be able to give her children a proper meal: this film, set in Hamburg, tells the story of these superheroes; it is the story of the precarious lives of middle-class youths, a story of conformity and resignation, and one of visions and spectacular deeds.

Germany 2008, 80 min
by Niels-Christian Bolbrinker

In the summer of 1938, German painter and landscape photographer Alfred Ehrhardt and his wife Lotte travelled to Iceland. Ehrhardt, a former Bauhaus student and one of the most important of the New Objectivity photographers, was looking for artistic form in nature and the fundamental forms of art. The film follows Ehrhardt's expeditions to Iceland, the Mudflats and the Curonian Spit and uses his wonderful photographs to address the question posed by Cees Noteboom: "Something in nature, and not by design, radiates a great beauty. But whose beauty is it? That of nature or of the photographer's work?" NATURE BEFORE US is a rediscovery of Alfred Ehrhardt's long-forgotten work at a time of global environmental crisis when its message could not be more appropriate: "Creation is not a matter of a few days at the beginning of time. Creation is taking place constantly and everywhere. We exist in its midst and contribute to it constantly."

Germany 2008, 59 min
by Thomas Tielsch

Nobody had expected his return. Still, in the face of the world publicity, he steps out from the dark of his past on September 11th in 2001. Since then, he has been back: the martyr. His history reaches far back into the ancient world, but only in Christ, he gets a face. By now the martyr has become a figure of many faces and shows up wherever conflicts are smouldering. Human sacrifices, massacres, mass suicides, tortures; Nuns whose asceticism is flooded by erotic fantasies. The film shows history and background of the worshipping of martyrs in Judaism, Christianity and Islam and describes the forming of a new religion in the 20th century: Nationalism, which has been breeding new martyrs to this day. A dip into history that makes contemporary conflicts appear in a new light.

Germany 2008, 73 min
by Dominik Wessely

When the frail and staunchly catholic aunt Hedwig asks her nephew to accompany her to a decidedly mystical Catholic service, it turns out to be his initiation into a fantastical world of martyr worship. He meets relic collectors who are trying to preserve the dwindling world of Salvation in living rooms full of bones, and, whilst gathering information pertaining to relics he intends to purchase for his aunt on the internet, he stumbles upon one of the greatest forgeries of the Middle Ages. It is the legend of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand accompanying maids who were slain, together with their mistress, in Cologne. Aunt Hedwig's nephew is not only confronted with the enchanting blossoms of popular piety, but also with a way of life that suddenly seems far less aberrant than initially expected. This is a jovial film about the gravity of life before death.

Germany 2008, 92 min
by Niels-Christian Bolbrinker, Dr. Kerstin Stutterheim

Ilya Kabakov was born in the Ukraine in 1933. Today he is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide, and there is practically no significant museum of contemporary art around the world that doesn't show at least one of his installations. With his etchings, paintings and particularly with these installations he has for decades now created a phantastic world that serves as a counterpoint to the brutal reality and its many failed visions. These installations, executed with exquisite detail, are strange and enchanted spaces. They are like film sets telling life histories, touching emotions and memories held by people everywhere. But his stories are more than personal dramas: Kabakov is one of the last great utopists, he looks disenchantedly at the debris of the 20th century but at the same time, with human warmth and a distinct imagination, he is able to envision other worlds.

Germany 2005
by Andreas Geiger

Donzdorf on the edge of the Swabian mountains in Southern Germany. A village just like any other, with a pointed church spire, a supermarket and a new housing estate. But Donzdorf is the seat of “Nuclear Blast Records”, one of the world’s most successful independent heavy-metal record companies. The company’s boss, Markus Staiger, grew up with heavy metal, like many young people in rural areas, and has turned his enthusiasm into an empire with branches in Los Angeles and other major cities. Housewives from the village work for the mail order department, sending out bloody skulls to every conceivable place in the world. Listening Sessions are held in the village pub, where the offerings are commented on by the regulars as critically as by international journalists. The film takes a look at the occasionally comical interaction of the tranquil village inhabitants with the rather crude hard rock scene. But traditional positions have shifted: whereas heavy metal once stood for rebellion against provincial traditions and conventions, it has today, far removed from urban subcultures, long become a firm and established part of life in the country.