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- When former pro swimmer Sara and her sister Yusra arrived in Germany from war-torn Syria they were Europe's most celebrated refugees. Now Sara is facing a 20-year prison sentence for volunteering with a Greek NGO, helping other refugees.
- In Hungary, the poor and weak are increasingly stigmatized to obscure the failure of the state. While authorities continue monopolizing power and turning citizens into subjects, extensive revisions of the fundamental law criminalized homelessness and reformed the social sector cutting the amount of available social benefits. In Hungary today 120,000 state-owned flats stand empty, while almost 30,000 people have no home. But AVM (English: THE CITY IS FOR ALL), a group of homeless people and activists, confronts the authorities to defend the right of shelter, social welfare and human dignity. They work to improve the situation of people in poverty by speaking up against unjust social policies. The group fights by occupying Parliament Square, preventing evictions, lobbying local authorities and providing pro bono legal aid to those in need. AVM is a mini-society based on solidarity and democracy in a society that is gradually drifting "the other way". Three years of intensive research into AVM's life has given us unprecedented access to the group and its protagonists. Their community and their shared sense of purpose give them the strength to fight injustices, in line with the Civil Rights Movement tradition. Their personal stories and reflections inspire agency and citizenship that means taking life into your own hands. Many ask, what is democracy in Europe today? What is its face in a country like Hungary, where every third citizen lives under the poverty line, where social housing makes up less than 3% of the housing stock?
- Over the course of one winter, this four-part documentary series by director Carl Gierstorfer and co-author Mareike Müller observes an intensive care unit at Berlin's Charité hospital, at the height of the pandemic to date. The films offer an intimate insight into a world on the threshold between life and death, unknown to most. Around the clock, the staff on Ward 43 fight to save the lives of those seriously ill with the novel Coronavirus. Up close and without commentary, "Inside Charité: Covid-ICU 43" tells the story of this struggle in a microcosm that knows neither day or night, populated by glaring lights and beeping machines. Despite high-tech intensive care and immense personal dedication, the staff repeatedly come up against the limits of their human abilities. They are confronted with a completely new disease that can damage the entire body and defies tried and tested therapies. Time and again, the experienced doctors and nurses have to accept the inevitable and let their patients go. At the end of a long shift, this can often feel like a defeat - and leaves its mark on those who remain.
- Baile Herculane is one of the oldest resorts in Europe and the place where only a few centuries ago kings and queens were swimming in the healing waters. Relu, Mitica and Gelu are three masseurs, who serve as our tour guides through this magical maze of an Eastern European 'Garden of Eden'.
- On 24 July 2010, the Loveparade in Duisburg ends in a catastrophe: 21 people lose their lives and 652 are injured as mass panic breaks out at the festival. More than 7 years later, in December 2017, the court case for legal reappraisal of the catastrophe begins. LOVEPARADE: THE TRIAL follows the case up close with a host of protagonists who are themselves involved in the proceedings. The film documents one of the most complicated criminal trials in post-war German history, from its first day to its very last. The result is a complex contemporary portrait, brought together by Director Dominik Wessely through a variety of questions, voices and materials.
- Sepideh wants to become an astronaut. She spends her nights exploring the secrets of the universe, while her family will do anything to keep her on the ground. The expectations for a young Iranian woman are very different from Sepideh's ambitions, and her plans to go to university are in danger. But Sepideh holds on to her dream! She takes up the fight and teams up with the world's first female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari.
- A century ago, the people of the Mashco Piro fled deep into the Peruvian Amazon to escape the cruelty of colonialist rubber companies. They cut all contact with the outside world, entering an isolation they still haven't abandoned. German filmmaker/biologist, Carl Gierstorfer, turns around in front of the forest, looking back at those who want to contact the isolated Mashco Piro: missionaries, gold miners, drug traffickers, ordinary villagers. Only a group of dedicated anthropologists stands between outside forces and the Mashco Piro, themselves torn between curiosity and fear. When a murder happens, Gierstorfer is there to document the story.
- It's a billion-dollar business: Criminal networks from Nigeria make money from drug and human trafficking. In their home country, they lure young women with the prospect of a secure future in Europe - a fateful promise. Because it leads to forced prostitution. The women pay thousands of euros for the often illegal journey. Once there, the human traffickers demand the money back and force the young women into prostitution. They are put under psychological pressure by an archaic "Yuyu" ritual intended to prevent them from escaping and escaping their tormentors. "Without demand, the business would not exist," says social worker Princess Inyang Okokon. She herself had fallen into the hands of human traffickers, but managed to get out and is now helping other women to break out of forced prostitution. Fateful Promises reveals how the traffickers operate. The documentary accompanies the committed Italian prosecutor Lina Trovato and the German investigator Colin Nierenz in their work and tells of the fate of young Nigerian women who managed to escape from forced prostitution.
- "Mirror, Mirror On The Wall" is a film about the lofty ambition and lonely inner life of a cosmetic surgeon and self-proclaimed performance artist from China, as well as the women who shape him; the mother whose approval he can never seem to win, his American PA with unhealed wounds of her own, and his remarkably grounded 17-year-old daughter. And then there are the fans. Legions of young women live-streaming every act of their surgeries. This film operates on many levels to bring the depths of selfie culture and the death of privacy into sharp focus.
- Kabul-Luftbrücke is an NGO from Berlin that evacuates people from Afghanistan on its own initiative because their lives are in danger as local forces, media workers or human rights activists. The series documents how former local forces manage to leave the country, how children hope for a reunion who were separated from their parents during the flight, and how young women decide to no longer bow to the rules of the Taliban.
- Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin headed up a secret film unit that sought to redefine America in the eyes of the world during the darkest days of World War II. The filmmakers created powerful short documentaries that showed America's strength not through images of tanks, but in portraits of farmers, school children and window washers. The "Projections of America" films were brilliant, moving portraits of America that were unlike any films ever made before, but seventy years later they are forgotten, hidden away in government archives. Narrated by John Lithgow, PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA tells the dramatic story of Riskin and his team, and the risks they took to project a profoundly democratic vision of the nation that would soon emerge as the most powerful on earth.
- "Refugee 11" are 27 players from 15 countries. Five Syrians, four Afghans and three Ghanaians - other players are from Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan and Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, from Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania. They don't speak the same language; they couldn't be more different. During the week they wait for a letter from the ministry of immigration - hoping to be allowed to start a new life. Every weekend, they play soccer - in the lowest league, but they give it their best. It's their only opportunity to feel free, to show the world who they are and that they can make it on their own. "Refugee 11" tells the story of this refugee soccer team and their every-day life in small-town Germany near Cologne. The film follows the team and the townspeople through the season of 2016 for six months. A story of young men who came to stay, about the challenges they face and the obstacles they have to overcome to become a team and to stay in Germany. A story of hope and acceptance, the magic of soccer and the realm of the possible.
- This striking documentary tells the compelling story of one Liberian community's fight for survival against Ebola. The film is told from the perspective of those who personally faced the disease, showcasing the ravages, death and tragedy they confronted, but also their struggle to bring the outbreak to an end. With great emotional depth, four main characters from the village reveal their efforts to confront the outbreak and the difficult process of recovering from its deadly reach. Mabel Musa, an ambulance nurse, and her team spearhead the fight against the spreading outbreak. Stanley lives in hiding-he's blamed for bringing Ebola to their village and is now an outcast. But Reverend Victor Padmore fights to reunite Stanley with his fellow villagers. Tawoo battles the virus and survives, and though his family members succumb to Ebola, he remains strong and determined to take back his life. These compelling stories reveal the human toll of this deadly disease.
- Even now, 150 years since the country opened itself up to the world in 1868, there is something uniquely special and particular about Japan, something which seems to survive its hectic pace, hyper-modern technology and mega-metropolis of Tokyo, all hallmarks of the age of globalization. Director Bianca Charamsa made her way to Japan during this year's cherry blossom season to get to grips with the country's character through conversations with some of its artists. Among those she met were the actress Kaori Momoi, superstar architect Tadao Ando, Cannes award-winning director Naomi Kawase, and other cultural figures such as the artist Takahiro Iwasaki, writer Keiichiro Hirano and two guardians of traditional culture: a Soto Yen priest and a tea master. Although two violent atomic catastrophes - the bombing of Hiroshima and the Fukushima nuclear disaster - have shaken and shaped modern-day Japan, the artist Takahiro Iwasaki believes that memory of 6th and 9th August 1945 is slowly fading, despite all the folded cranes left by visitors to the memorial sites. Natural catastrophes like sea- and earthquakes also rock Japan time and time again; perhaps this explains why the Japanese aesthetic Wabi Sabi incorporates both beauty and decay...much like the beauty of the cherry blossom as it withers during the annual festival of Hanami.
- Investigative crime-documentary about how the arms of the Nigerian mafia reach far into Europe and use religious pressure to keep trafficked women in prostitution.
- Young Polish filmmaker Michal Wnuk finds an Agfa box of 120 photographs and 2 reels of 16mm film. For the first time, he gets to see World War II through the eyes of his grandfather, who served in the Wehrmacht. Soon Michal discovers that the box didn't belong to his grandfather but to his great-uncle Elek - an anti-German fighter and a decorated war hero. Michal uncovers the intriguing story behind the Agfa box, traveling across Poland and Germany in a journey that leads him back to the last summer days of 1939.