Das Sklaverei-Netzwerk

Around Paradise

In Caazapá, the “city of magic and legends”, two Paraguayan students are searching for happiness, gold and a magic bird. Their European dropout neighbours are hoping for freedom, healing and salvation from Armageddon. Everything has its price.

Blue Sky White Clouds

Grandma has become a little doddery. And since the death of her husband, called E.O., ever bigger gaps have opened in her memory, and her disorientation has increased. Director Astrid Menzel makes a decision: to take a ten-day canoe trip on northern German waters with her brother and the 86-year-old lady. An adventure whose outcome is uncertain and which the three travellers have to face anew at every stage.

Born to Fake

In 1996, one of the biggest media scandals in German history shook the public: Michael Born, a self-made journalist, had faked over twenty reports for the newly established private television station between 1990 and 1996. Some seemed amateurish, others dealt with absurd topics: child labor for IKEA in India, drug addicts licking toads to get high, and the Ku Klux Klan in the Eifel region were just some of his numerous fabrications. How did it come to this? Was Michael Born an enlightened figure who subversively exposed the tabloid system, a victim of the system, or simply a bumbling fraud? Film traces Michael Born's footsteps. Put together from hundreds of hours of raw material and the memories of former companions, an incredible story of forgery emerges. A media-theoretical film about levels of reality, fake news, and the question: Why do we actually believe what we see?

Xylobionta - die verborgene Welt der holzbewohnenden Käfer

The High Ground (Tomintoul)

Circusboy

Santino, a circus kid constantly on the move, listens to his great-grandfather's stories as his own life is just beginning.

Ottobiography

Gesichter der Armut - Unsere Kleidung aus Bangladesch

They sew our clothes, tan leather for shoes and bags. Twelve hours of work, every day. Despite this, the people in the supplier countries are often desperately poor. How does this poverty come about? Manfred Karremann explores this question using the example of Bangladesh, where much of what we use every day is produced. Bangladesh is the second largest textile producer in the world after China. The main reason for the poverty: goods are produced incredibly cheaply in Bangladesh. About nine cents an hour is paid for the dangerous work in a tannery. The seamstresses in the textile factories get a little more. Just enough to survive. Because that's what it's all about for the men, women and children who do any job, for any wage.

Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance

Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance, the first-ever documentary portrait of one of the greatest musicians and songwriters of our time. Assured of Costello’s full collaboration, exclusive access to his extensive archive and with the full participation of his record company, the film is a definitive portrait of a major music icon.

The Ballad of Shovels and Rope

The tours and detours of a husband and wife as they create and release the critically acclaimed album, O' Be Joyful. From working for tips to becoming "Emerging Artist of the Year," the two-man family band uses ingenuity and hard work to create something out of nothing.

Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women In Jazz

Lady Be Good reveals the lost stories of female jazz musicians from the early 1920s to the 1970s. Narrated by musician-composer Patrice Rushen, the film charts the influence of female players from the struggles and successes of early innovators (Sweet Emma Barrett, Lil Hardin-Armstrong), through the rise of the all-woman big bands (Ina Ray Hutton & Her Melodears, the Hollywood Redheads), to the female musicians that were instrumental players (Dorothy Donegan, Mary Osborne) and arrangers (Mary Lou Williams, Melba Liston) for more famous male band leaders, including Benny Goodman and Quincy Jones. Unfolding over nine parts, director Kay D. Ray's debut film weaves provocative and often humorous interviews with female musicians, big band leaders, jazz authors, and historians throughout a film stuffed end-to-end with archival photos, recordings, and performance footage to create a documentary that restores an essential part of our musical history.

Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story

This soulful documentary illuminates the hell-and- back life of the late, great L.A. alto sax legend Frank Morgan. A prodigy who was acclaimed as the natural heir to his bebop mentor, Charlie Parker, Morgan derailed his career with heroin, which led him into a life of crime. After decades in prison, he made an astonishing comeback, leaving behind recordings of deep, melancholy beauty. Framed by a tribute concert held in San Quentin, where Morgan’s 19-year-old Asian-American protégé, Grace Kelly, performs a heart-stopping version of “Over the Rainbow,” N.C. Heikin’s film is filled with revealing interviews with the colleagues, lovers, family and wives who accompanied Morgan on his long and rocky journey to redemption.

Sunday Ball

In Rio de Janeiro, close to the mythical Maracana stadium, venue for the grand final of the World Cup 2014, we find an ordinary football field in the Sampaio neighborhood. There, football happens as a genuine expression of Brazilian culture. With the games on Sundays, the annual slum football league has 14 teams. Each represents the colors and rituals of their community. Geração x Juventude contest the final.

Still the Enemy Within

A documentary about the 1984 Miner's Strike which changed Britain forever.

Soul Food Stories

Satovcha is a small Bulgarian village with 2021 residents of a different religious and ethic groups (Orthodox Christians, Muslim Turks and Evangelist Gypsies). People were divided by their past full of conflicts, but now they have find a way to each other through a simple medium - the food. Now the plates on the table are loaded with pride, identity, common past and friendship, but all this comes with a price....

Sacred Sperm

The film creates a daring first exposure on the way parents, rabbis, teachers, pedagogues and therapists within the Orthodox Hasidic Jewish Community educating their male children from infancy to adolescence, to avoid spilling their sperm. They target them to keep their seed only after marriage with a female for the purpose of fertilization. "Sacred Sperm" penetrates into one of the most suppressed hidden issues in the Orthodox Hasidic Jewish Community - a Taboo. Throughout the film we follow the emotional and theological struggle of the director who is trying to find a proper way as a father to explain his teenager son logically why he should keep this major Mitzvah (commandment) which perceived by many as unreasonable and seems impossible to fulfill.

Taking on the Kennedys

What would it be like to run against one of the most powerful political families in America? Enter the backrooms of American politics as a doctor named Kevin Vigilante takes on the Kennedys. In his first race for public office, Kevin Vigilante challenges Ted Kennedy's youngest son, Patrick, and gets the political education of a lifetime. Dedicated to running a clean fight, Vigilante soon finds himself in the midst of a mud slinging contest. With negative ads about Vigilante filling the airwaves, and John F. Kennedy Jr. signing autographs outside polling stations, Vigilante realizes he has no chance of winning without slinging mud of his own, and proceeds to take off his gloves. Endemic of contemporary campaign politics, the sound byte takes precedence over the speech as issues are overshadowed by negative television advertisements. Taking on the Kennedys aired as a part of PBS' P.O.V. series.