The Loneliness of the Big City Dwellers

Elias Gottstein and Carl Luis Zielke have no fixed abode, no education, no bank account, no securities. Instead, they are living their dream of freedom: radical, anarchic, unplugged! They are young, they are intelligent, they are hungry: for life, for music, for a future far removed from the bourgeois imaginary world. They also have an irrepressible optimism that they can shape this life themselves with and through their music. As Guaia Guaia, they travel from city to city on self-built bicycles, attracting fans and police officers with loud, illegal concerts.

The actor, columnist, author, moderator, the failed pastoral assistant, the self-confessed gay sadomasochist, the total work of art Hermes Phettberg, who has always been relentlessly open about his life, his suffering in himself and the world, gives insight into his current existence. Despite his decline, Phettberg has remained a charismatic, unique "pyre" (as he calls himself) who documents his slowly fading life daily on the Internet and in his weekly column in the Viennese city magazine "Falter" and struggles to survive as Austria's best-known welfare recipient. Sobo Swobodnik shows this daily struggle of a one-time star who became a patronized outsider - with three strokes, a heart attack, extreme bladder weakness and an irrepressible will to go on living.

Documentary on the daily life of a sexual masseuse in Berlin.

Kraftwerk, Björk, Rammstein or Robbie Williams on tour are not just concerts, but pop operas, the most spectacular stage events of our time. Tens of thousands make the pilgrimage to stadiums and halls to be there. But nobody knows the man in the background. Scumeck Sabottka has been a concert promoter for over 30 years. Constantly traveling, constantly negotiating, always on the lookout for the next big thing. An ex-punk from the Ruhr area who started out as a bus driver for Einstürzende Neubauten, worked his way up, came close to bankruptcy twice and then struck a deal with legendary promoters Fritz Rau and Marcel Avram.

Ramba Zamba: a theater with handicapped and non-handicapped people/actresses and actors, which has been living and working on inclusive integrative togetherness impressively every day for thirty years now. The film accompanies the mentally and physically impaired actresses and actors for six months through the theatrical production of the play GOLEM, from the beginning of rehearsals to the premiere. In doing so, the film is also partly influenced by the portrayed persons themselves, quasi inclusively co-determined, by them capturing their own view and perception, their view of reality itself on film.

Marga is a forty-two-year-old actress who seems to have already passed the peak of her career. After starting her career in theater on the country's major stages (Volksbühne Berlin, Berliner Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater), it is becoming increasingly difficult for her to find work. Not only in theater, but also in film, it seems to be getting harder to get roles as she gets older and as a woman, especially a woman with a migrant background.

The director's mother is 90 years old—and is beginning to forget herself. Not only herself, but everything else as well. She has dementia. Only her faith and her tireless knitting of exclusively blue socks keep her alive. The director, whose relationship with his mother has been very tense throughout his life, approaches the dissolution of his mother's ego in this experimental and essayistic film with the support of Didier Eribon, Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Jean Améry, and others. In addition to this very personal story, he also tells a universal story about the process of aging, about repression, but also about rebellion in dealing with and interacting with aging people.

The diagnosis: an aneurysm in the brain. Then follow two nightmarish months during which we accompany the filmmaker. An essayistic audio-visual collage, in which Sobo Swobodnik shows us what it means to live with a potentially fatal condition.