Angela Schanelec

After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.

An ordinary working day on a construction site. Thomas, a 40-year-old crane operator, receives a call from his wife asking him to pick her up from the hospital. He finds her crying.

Mimmi is a very lonely girl, not knowing what to do with her life. On the search for friends and boyfriends, she wanders around alone in different cities.

Scenes from the seminar "Lange Sprechen." Angela Schanelec, HFBK Summer Semester 2024.

Abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night, Jon is taken in and adopted, without having known his father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, a warden in the prison where he is incarcerated after a deadly tragic accident. She seems to seek out his presence, takes care of him, records music for him. Jon’s eyesight begins to fail... From then on, for every loss he suffers, he will gain something in return. Thus, in spite of going blind, he will live his life more fully than ever.

A young photographer has fallen in love with his girlfriend's sister, throwing the trio into chaos.

A woman faces a variety of emotional crises as she spends the summer interacting in various ways with friends, family, and lovers.

Sandra Hüller plays Hamlet, Gina Haller, a figure that was composed of Ophelia and Horatio. Johan Simons staged the Bochum performance.

A young Berlin photographer participates in an apartment swap with a stranger in Marseille to briefly explore the French city.

Thirteen European directors explore the theme of Sarajevo; what this city has represented in European history over the past hundred years, and what Sarajevo stands for today in Europe. These eminent filmmakers of different generations and origins offer exceptional singular styles and visions.

A family spends three summer days in a beautiful lake mansion close to Berlin. Together with her new lover, Irene visits her brother Alex, who still inhabits the house with Irene's writer son Konstantin. Konstantin's girl-friend pops in, too, and all of them drift away from each other more and more.

Die UFA, a film essay about the eponymous German studio.

Thirteen German directors present short films exploring the state of their country.

A woman converses with another over the phone, witnesses a theft, and samples a record in a store.

Nadine is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing, until she hears someone else singing and everything falls back into place again. A melancholic observation of two young couples having difficulties trusting one another. They are full of skepticism and searching for a purpose in life.

A Glasgow woman inherits a house in Berlin and has her eyes opened

This somewhat superficial historical drama is about the 1525 Peasants' War in Germany when the lower classes rebelled against oppressive conditions imposed by the clergy and nobility and then committed many acts (including atrocities) that did not morally set them far apart from the people they were fighting. It was a time of upheaval: Martin Luther (1483-1556) had broken away from the Catholic Church, calling for reform, and Anabaptists in Germany, like Thomas Munzer fought on the side of the peasants (opposed by Luther). This complex age and its political and religious turmoil are summed up in a story about an attack on a small monastery whose monks used a forged document to confiscate some land from the peasants. When their wrong-doing is revealed by the monk who forged the document in the first place, the peasants attack.

A character study as well as a meditation on communication, creativity, and physical space, Take What You Can Carry is a picture of a young woman seen through the interiors she occupies and the company she keeps. A North American living abroad, Lilly aspires to shape an intimate and private place of her own while connecting to the world around her. When she receives a letter from home, it provides the conduit she needs to fuse her transient self with the person she's always known herself to be.

Can and his girlfriend, Jale, live with their young daughter, Meral, in a tough Turkish neighbourhood of Berlin and barely manage to scrape enough money together for their existence. Can is a small-time dealer and errand-boy for drug boss Hakan, who has to keep his customers supplied within his narrowly staked out territory. Jale, who works in the ware-house of a department store, has been pressing Can to give up this activity. Can, also fed up with his situation, sees a bright new beginning for himself and his family when Hakan offers him the prospective chance to run a bar on his very own. But Can has little control over the pressures that gradually begin to build up around him and soon finds himself floundering in quicksand.

Theres and Kenneth are both young when they first meet whilst on holiday. They fall in love but are unable to prevent themselves from losing each other. Thirty years later, in another country, another couple: Ariane leaves her husband David because she no longer loves him. The paths they both take lead them to Kenneth and Theres.

At the Paris airport Orly, a woman falls for a stranger, a family heads to a funeral, a couple lose touch, a wife reads her husband’s break-up letter. All wait for their planes. Absorbed in their immediate fates, they move through the impeccably structured space, unaware of a looming threat outside.

The aristocratic families of Rossitz and Warwand, who are relatives, have started to treat each other with mistrust and hatred, since a testamentary contract has stated, that the complete goods will be inherited to the respective surviving line. At the same time the young generation is in love, how can the tender ties between Agnes of Warwand and Ottokar of Rossitz be protected? Killed by their own fathers, they lie in their blood. A radical drama about the term "family". (www.filmgalerie451.de)

Prompted by a seminar given by acclaimed German filmmaker Peter Nestler, Prague, March '92 combines 16mm footage shot over the course of a week in the title city with excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal's essay "The Magic Flute," which considers the 20th anniversary demonstrations in Prague to commemorate the death of Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion.