Films by Uwe Mann

Germany 2023, 90 min
by Sabine Michel

Petry, Schwesig, Magwas and Domscheit-Berg: four female politicians with their roots in the East on the reunification of Germany and the role of women.Symbolic: on the election campaign stand in front of the Mäc Geiz discount store, the left-wing politician Anke Domscheit-Berg discusses the differences in pay between East and West Germany with passers-by – more than thirty years after reunification. She is one of four female politicians with East German backgrounds portrayed in the film. Alongside her, Manuela Schwesig, Yvonne Magwas and Frauke Petry analyse German history – and their own life stories. [38 DOK.fest München, Anka Klauck]

Germany 2023, 178 min
by Volker Koepp

In Uwe Johnson’s last study in the English town of Sheerness, there was a map of Mecklenburg on the wall – the region of his childhood, to which he never returned after his emigration to the West and could only reconstruct in the literary sense afterwards. Volker Koepp’s film is conceived as a geobiography: he travels with Johnson’s texts to places from the author’s life, finding people and landscapes connected to his work and his person, sometimes closely, sometimes more loosely. Koepp’s and Johnson’s poetic projects intertwine: their landscapes and biographies resist linear progression; history remains stored in them only to reveal itself again and again. For Johnson, when he swims in the Baltic Sea, the dead are present, floating in the Bay of Lübeck after the 1945 sinking of the Cap Arcona. Koepp speaks with a woman who recalls how holidaying in Italy evoked thoughts of those fleeing across the Mediterranean by boat. Johnson’s sorrow at the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops is mirrored in Russia’s ongoing attack on Ukraine, which affects the filming. When a river flows slowly, it can change direction with even just a little wind and return to its source. ( catalogue text by Jan Künemund, 53 Berlinale Forum @ 73 BERLINALE)With Judith Zander, Peter Kurth, Heinz Lehmbäcker, Hanna Lehmbäcker, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

2021, 96 min
by Hans Broich

Volker Spengler allegedly once said, “Do you know what a liberal is? A Nazi without a spine!”. This story is told at one of the tables in a Berlin based pub, Diener Tattersall, where the filmmakers have gathered several of the celebrated actor’s companions. Over the course of the film, these people – actors, directors, musicians, and leading figures of the film, performance and theater scene – tell anecdotes about Volker Spengler, reminiscing of their first encounters and embarrassing moments, their admiration and irritation. It remains unclear as to who is sitting with whom at what time. The montage essentially creates a cinematic space of its own in which everyone can potentially talk to and listen to everyone else. This space always seems to exist a little outside of time, or indeed, in its own mythical in-between time. Many memories linger: the fact that he always smelled nice; his paradoxical potential to be very tender and yet extremely rude; his uproarious, rasping laughter; and the fact that he wasn’t a liberal.With:Inga Busch, Karina Fallenstein, Marc Siegel, Margarita Broich, Marie Löcker, Martin Wuttke, Maximillian Brauer, Rainer Will, René Pollesch, Susanne Sachse, Vaginal Davis, Volker Spengler, Wieland Schulz-Keil

Germany 2019, 98 min
by Grit Lemke

"My swing is in an enchanted garden, behind the railway embankment. Up in the air, on my swing, I see the trains, squeaking past day and night shedding black dust. They come out of the huge holes that gape between our villages. As a child, I think the whole world looks like this: Holes, with villages between, my swing in the middle. And the trains. They're coal trains." Gerhard Gundermann (1955–1998), singer-songwriter, poet and excavator operator in the Lusatian brown coal mines. In this region, global problems are condensed on a local level as if by a burning glass – from structural change to climate crisis. Mostly unpublished archive material and Gundermann’s songs enter into a dialogue with observations and conversations in his 'district', accompanied by the voice-over of the director, who is no less deeply rooted in the coal mining district. Home and its destruction through strip mining, utopian ideas and the question of individual responsibility run through the songs, as do their consequences for gainful employment and the environment at the end of the industrial age. And they are more topical than ever today: "Where my swing stood, then your digger, is now a lake." (DOK Leipzig, Frederik Lang)

Germany 2018, 135 min
by Volker Koepp

With SEESTÜCK, Volker Koepp concludes a series of documentaries that he began in 2010 with BERLIN-STETTIN. In this film, the director mixed autobiographical references with his description of East German film and living spaces for the first time. IN SARMATIA, 2013 he expanded the view of the region east of the Weichsel (Vistula) and between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. With LANDSTÜCK, 2016, Volker Koepp returned to the Uckermark in the north of Berlin. SEESTÜCK - a film about the Baltic Sea, about life by the sea and with the sea - concludes the series. As in the films before, the arcs of history are reflected here in the private lives of the present. The following also applies to the small Baltic Sea: landscape is world view.

Germany 2013, 88 min
by Uwe Mann

Love does not know time. In 1966 Heiner Hinrichs was the youngest and most successful construction manager of Halle-Neustadt at the age of only 28. At his age he celebrates the autumn of his life with passion and humor and shares it with two women. But now he moves to a new apartment. And so the chubby pensioner has to chop-off his roots from a place that he influenced significantly. His resistance and ongoing will for independence lead to grotesque situations. Heiner Hinrichs shows that love and passion are indeed consistent with being old.