Shake the Devil Off

Television makes us sluggish, hypnotizes us, and makes us addicted. Why? How? Is it intentional? From European homes to American laboratories, via the studios of a Japanese channel, the Tube team investigates. Its goal: to discover what the all-powerful television industry is hiding from us on the other side of the screen.

The hills of Lausanne, Switzerland, have become a Mecca for roller-skaters and Ivano has become a prince among them. Ivano rises above the ordinary and often dead-end choices that most young people face today.

"Oil Rocks" - behind the enigmatic name lies the first and largest offshore oil-platform ever built, a vast city in the middle of the Caspian Sea, built by Stalin in 1949. 60 years on, "Oil Rocks" is still operational and the first western film crew ever receives access. Just imagine: 200 kilometers of bridges, thousands of oil workers, hundreds of platforms, up to nine-story buildings, a park and sports field, nothing less then an oil-rig Atlantis, only real. Combining archive footage from the Soviet era and the exclusive new footage, the film tells the story of this timeless place and it's inhabitants.

A story of abandonment and discovery, of silence and of sharing, of how fate has shaped the lives of three women.

The extraordinary destiny of two people. After the Second World War, Lois is an actress in Broadway theatre, television and Hollywood films. Her husband, Edgar Snow, is world famous. A pioneer fascinated by China, he is the first journalist to film and interview Mao Tse-tung. Suspected by the American authorities of Communist sympathies, Ed and Lois are blacklisted. Together with their two small children, they go to Switzerland, mid-way between China and America, where they find a new home. A story of revolution, utopia, disillusionment, and hope.

A century ago, the grandparents of film director Peter Entell had to flee Ukraine, a land torn apart by war and massacres. One hundred years later, Entell faces the same destructive nationalism. People continue to kill in the name of the mother country, flag, culture, religion… The memory of the atrocities suffered by the Jews, the Tatar Muslims of Crimea, and the Orthodox population, is transmitted from generation to generation, and with it the poison of hatred. Crossing checkpoints, Peter Entell takes us from the loyalist Ukrainians to the pro-Russian separatists. The purpose is not to show who is right or wrong – humanity itself is defeated. In the midst of this senseless violence, the film transcends cultural, religious and national differences to uncover the deeper bonds that unite us all.

Peter Entell has been almost compulsively filming his father Max for years. Max is a cheerful man, a hug addict, who suggests to his son that he direct a film about old age called “It’s Fun to Be Old”. Getting Old Stinks is a moving filmed letter taking the form of an imaginary correspondence with the director’s absent mother, of whom all that is left are some photographs.