In moving interviews, four fathers describe their suffering and efforts to keep contact with their children. A mother justifies the refusal of contact from her point of view. Despite the seriousness of the topic, the film manages to remain entertaining and even delivers an amusing snapshot of German sensitivities and the state of the Republic.
Ralf BähringerEr selbstFranzjörg KriegEr selbstBirgit LaubSie selbstSophie LaubSie selbstHarald MerkerEr selbstBernd SosnaEr selbst
Douglas WolfspergerEr selbst
In the table that symbolizes the value of traditional women, a woman who wants to break free from her family must face her daughter.
Lou Colpé has been filming her grandparents since she was 15. In the process of this intense relationship, she notices some disconcerting signs in her grandmother: Alzheimer’s is slowing her down. A new film begins, a tougher one: the story of a couple that must face a tremendous challenge. Struggling against the tide of oblivion, the task of filmmaking becomes the ultimate act of resistance. Trying to retain the last images of her grandparents, an intimate conversation begins and echoes through the songs that play on the radio, conjuring lost stories and memories.
Violeta and Vyollca Dukay live in the south of Kosovo, close to the border with Albania. Faced with a very high unemployment in their country since the end of the war, they became deminers. They’ve been going to the minefields every day for six years now. The unique and very strong relationship that exists between the two sisters helps them to overcome their fear and to keep hoping in spite of the precariousness of their situation and the risks they run each day to earn their living.
Lisa Lewenz retraces the steps of her Jewish grandmother who dared to film life in Berlin during the rise of Nazi Germany.
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i in the 1910s. Amidst the solitude of his home routines — coupon clipping, rigging an improvised barbecue, lighting firecrackers on the New Year — we glimpse an unexpectedly rich inner life.
A study of my parents in grey and white. An evening film. My mother lights the sabbath candles, cooks, crochets, sleeps, talks to father reading the paper – we are together. This is the first completed note.
Agricultural scientist and mother Isolde struggles with the dicrepancies between her personal convictions and the political realities in East Germany.
A portrait that follows Nan, my uncle and the last two years he and his parents live together. In long, tightly framed shots, a picture emerges of three intimately interwoven lives: the gentle and touching bickering between Nan and his mother, the evenings in front of the television when time seems to stand still, and the minutes ticking by as Grandpa silently peels an apple. In the film, disability is not only seen as symptoms on individual bodies, but as social, physical, and temporal relationships. It is a meditation on time, disabilities, and the economies of care in contemporary China.
When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.
A tragicomic documentary that portrays the very last acts of a long marriage. A film about the tentative search for a beginning of what - finally, and unfortunately - is over.
Photos, home videos and especially a series of audios recorded without Julia's consent are the essence of this film that tells the story of a woman who got married despite having many doubts and who never tired of seeking her own happiness.
An Oscar nominated documentary about a middle-class American family who is torn apart when the father Arnold and son Jesse are accused of sexually abusing numerous children. Director Jarecki interviews people from different sides of this tragic story and raises the question of whether they were rightfully tried when they claim they were innocent and there was never any evidence against them.
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
Nearly a decade in the making, The House We Lived In is a strikingly candid portrait of a family transformed by a father’s brain injury. In 2011, 61-year-old Tod O’Donnell awoke from a coma with a case of total amnesia that doctors assured his wife and children was temporary. But when it proved permanent, and for no discernible reason, the O’Donnell’s were left to themselves to untangle the mystery — a struggle for answers that would only raise more questions as they came to realize, painfully, that the real mystery was Tod himself.
Aunt Neirud was always present at family gatherings. Neirud was big, strong, and worked in the circus. Who was this woman so close to the family and about whom we know so little?
Filmmaker Evie Wray travels to rural Kansas in an attempt to reconnect with her mentally unstable mother, Evie, for the first time since Evie’s psychotic breakdown five years earlier. She finds a parent still chasing her demons, both real and imagined, struggling to make a career for herself as an abstract artist and searching for the Geodetic Center of the United States, the finding of which, Evie says, will bring about world peace.
Junha is one of the most difficult children at the school. His autism causes him to attack his classmates and even teachers without warning. Each outburst further isolates Junha from his community as his teachers and peers struggle to find a way to live "with" Junha. The camera provides an intimate look into this society, leaving the question; what is human entity and how is it connected?
Eneida, 83 years old, makes a journey into her past, in search of her firstborn daughter, whom she has not seen for over two decades.