That's How DEFA Sounded: Film Music from Babelsberg

Making of Russian Ark, with on camera personal views by members of the cast and crew of the major film.

Christian is a presenter at a small radio station. His wife Katrin directs traffic in a car park. Both are friends with Uwe, who runs a fast food kiosk, and Ellen, who works in a perfume shop. Their four lives are stuck in a rut. Until the day Chris and Ellen sleep together and upset the balance of the two couples...

DEFA made several science fiction films that are hardly known today. These productions, called "utopian films" in the GDR, show astonishing technical achievements. ...Science fiction at DEFA was never a war of the stars, no alien invasion, but in most cases an establishment of contact with the alien via signals, a recurring plot motif. Communication instead of confrontation. These films provide information about the image of a coming socialist society, about expectations and hopes, and they were counter-images to the officially condemned Western SF art.

Holocaust survivor, Gerda Schrage, shares her experience about giving birth to her child in Auschwitz.

Rosa von Praunheim is an icon in the scene: gay activist, loving provocateur and a very special filmmaker from Berlin for decades. His curiosity for people and their fates runs through his extensive film work. For his 70th birthday he has now made 70 new short films. In the first part of the big project, he confronts Thilo Sarrazin with the mayor of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, and the Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates; shows a homosexual hustler in Bucharest; gossip reporter Andreas Kurtz, who knows everything about Berlin's celebrities; Rosa's neighbors who live with her dependent brother; Esther Bauer, who survived Auschwitz, and the Berlin comedian Ades Zabel. High on the roofs of Berlin, the gay chimney sweep Alain Rappsilber tells him about his fetish leather meeting Folsom.