Films by Ümit Uludag

Germany 2023, 93 min
by André Krummel, Pablo Ben Yakov

A retired gay sex worker wants to get into politics. Leading a cosmopolitan and queer life, he is not the typical 'little man', but an intellectual without a university degree and bon vivant with addiction problems. Born a German Christian, he now lives as a Jewish Israeli in Tel Aviv and Berlin, in a relationship with a young Shanghainese man whose seemingly endless wealth provides for his dissolute lifestyle. GOLDHAMMER looks behind the facade of a millennial on his way to becoming a populist and traces a turbulent biography that could hardly be any more contradictory, but for that very reason seems to suit our times perfectly.

2021, 89 min
by Laurentia Genske, Robin Humboldt

Two Syrian sisters, on the verge of adulthood and trans *, are looking to find their way in their new home-country Germany. This film not only tells the moving story of a family that sticks together despite all hardships, but also poses the question of one's own identity. A coming-of-age documentary about the search for one's individual place in society.

Romania, Germany, Finland 2020, 86 min
by Radu Ciorniciuc

For two decades, the Enache family—nine kids and their parents—lived in a shack in the wilderness of Bucharest Delta: an abandoned water reservoir, one of the biggest urban natural reservations in the world, with lakes and hundreds of species of animals and rare plants. When the authorities decide to claim back this rare urban ecosystem, the Enache family is evicted and told to resettle in the city—a reality they know nothing about. Kids that used to spend their days in nature have to learn about city life, go to school instead of swimming in the lake, and swap their fishing rods for mobile phones. Their identity has been questioned and transformed, along with their sense of freedom and family ties.Radu Ciorniciuc’s heartbreaking debut is a thoughtful study of gentrification, seen through the eyes of a family trying to adapt to the new life they never asked for. Is it better to go back to their “paradise lost,” with its life free yet harsh, or to become part of the society that offers comforts but comes with pressures and conflict? [Sundance]

2019, 88 min
by Sobo Swobodnik

Thomas Walter was part of the Berlin autonomous scene. In 1995 he and two co-perpetrators were accused of having attempted an arson attack on an uninhabited deportation prison in Berlin-Grünau which was prevented by the police. Arrest warrants for the three as members of a leftist terrorist association are still valid today. They went underground for decades. It is only in 2017 that Walter contacts his family in Germany again – from Venezuela, where he has applied for asylum.Thomas Walter is also a relative of the Berlin filmmaker Sobo Swobodnik, who travels with a camera to the Andes in 2019 to meet the former autonomist in his home surrounded by vegetable gardens. This is where he is working on a music project with the Berlin singer Pablo Charlemoine aka Mal Élevé in an improvised studio in the kitchen. There’s also an extensive interview in which Walter, in Baden dialect, talks remarkably frankly (and self-righteously) about attitudes and events then and now. His former enthusiasm for the Chavist project has long since given way to criticism, but his anarchist ideals are still there. A film that offers a rare insight into a world usually invisible due to the pressure of legal persecution, with a soundtrack featuring the political and activist songs of Walter & Co. (DOK Leipzig, Silvia Hallensleben)