Black and Without Sugar

Shezad is a Pakistani refugee seeking his fortune in Hamburg. At night, he sells roses in pubs. During the day, he is looking for a job. He starts working as a dishwasher and soup cook in a Chinese restaurant. Xiao, the waiter, and Shezad dream of opening their own restaurant. Herder, the janitor of the asylum seekers' home and part-time escape helper, has to go abroad. Shezad takes over his job and finds the money for the restaurant in East Berlin by not entirely legal means. So Shezad and Xiao's dream comes true. However, the day of the opening ends differently than the two of them had imagined.

Year after year, just after the monsoon season has finished, thousands of families travel to a bleak desert in Gujerat, India, where they will stay for an endless eight months and extract salt from the earth, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Director Farida Pacha spent a season with one of these families, observing the very particular rhythms of their lives.

In letters to her idol, Brad Pitt, twelve-year-old Tina Vonlanthen pours out her heart about what life in a small Swiss border town on the Rhine is like: trouble with her older sister, twenty-year-old Babs, "who still hasn't found a man," and worries about her single father Urs, who has been so distracted lately. But it is neither spinsterhood nor Alzheimer's that the Vonlanthens suffer from. Rather, it is the small and large love affairs that they try to keep secret from each other: Babs' lover is her married German boss—and Urs' girlfriend is Caroline, a black woman from Cameroon. At the local big event, the "fish dinner," everything comes out in the open—and Tina also has some heart-pounding experiences that she prefers to keep quiet about in her letters to Brad...

In September 1989, more and more GDR citizens fled to the West German embassy in Prague. Among them were Stefan and Bettina, who were spending their honeymoon in Czechoslovakia. When Stefan briefly returns to the GDR to fetch their young son, he also brings their friends Karin and Thomas with him. There is no end to the influx of refugees and the embassy is completely overwhelmed with those wanting to leave. What's more, despite hectic negotiations behind the scenes, no political solution seems to be on the horizon. The situation in the embassy garden is becoming increasingly dramatic. A humanitarian catastrophe is imminent.

A comedy of crooks from Zurich's Cheib district: everyone wants to make a fortune. Goran, the owner of a second-hand shop, sells a stolen painting to his friends Don Ermanno from the Italian currency exchange office and Zhu Li from the Chinese strip club. But suddenly the whole neighborhood is interested in the painting. Only one question remains: who is actually ripping off whom?

Caregiver Hans-Peter Stalder knows the secret code to happiness: a money multiplication strategy that promises hand-picked investors almost unbelievable profits - and a carefree life of luxury. There's just one catch to his story. It's a hoax and only one person stands to benefit: Stalder. For thirteen years, the notorious conman and womanizer fools his naive victims and the authorities.

Short film by Dagmar Knöpfel. Based on a story by Italo Calvino.

A palliative care team visits homes of terminally ill patients to help them come to terms with the inevitability of death.