Essays

1802: The adventurous life story of Hans Bückler, known as “Schinderhannes”, who fights against the French occupying forces and large landowners who exploit poor farmers in the Hunsrück region during the Napoleonic Wars.

Tensions rise when a U.S. military base is built in a small village in post-war Germany.

The first part of this film is devoted to the Greek resistance against fascism and the civil war for independence. While the voice-over recites facts and names, photos take us into the past and the everyday lives of the people. The second part takes us to Greece in 1965, where the masses are protesting against the removal of the liberal Georgios Papandreou. – Two years later the military junta seized power in Greece. When Filmecho/Filmwoche called the film “communist”, it was doomed. It was rarely shown and originated the stigma that ultimately made it impossible for Peter Nestler to continue to work in Germany.

This dialogue-free short is edited to music and the rhythms of change in a small town in the Ruhr region, shot a few years after the first mining pits were closed in the area. Nestler takes his audience on a journey through mining pits, coal heaps, cold stores, and to workingmen settlements and pubs of Mülheim.

Portrait of a small south German village and its residents in the early sixties. Rural culture is undergoing a transformation caused by the intrusion of the industrial world. Gestures at work and words of its inhabitants.

A strangler is loose on a British estate, and he not only strangles his victims but brands an "M" onto their foreheads before he decapitates them.

A documentary of the town of Sheffield's main pub and the people who went there.

Roma and Sinti people talk about their experiences in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany, inspired by Otto Pankok’s paintings of Romani theme and subject in the 1930s, declared degenerate art by the Nazis. These are moving narratives of persecution, discrimination, marginalisation, of life as second-class human beings, all of which lasts, incredibly enough, right up to the allegedly democratic present day of the film, since they live in inhumane conditions in barracks at the margins of cities and society and are not officially recognised as Nazi victims. Long, nearly uncut sequences open space for the people and their stories. That’s all it takes for one of Peter and Zsóka Nestler’s most important works.

In 1950, Picasso was offered a room that had once been used as a chapel in his hometown of Vallauris. He pictured turning it into a “pagan site for a unique cult” that would “unite all the people and be dedicated to peace.”

In his first film, Peter Nestler gives voice to an old floodgate. A nearby village, its inhabitants, wooden posts and twisted willow rods are presented from this unusual perspective. The floodgate ponders the fisher boats coming home from the sea along the shipping channel which is fed at low tide by a small river.

Today, the Römerstrasse in Italy's Aosta valley, is a significant traffic artery in the center of modern Europe. Nestler's journey explores the moving history of the Aosta valley, which passed through many hands - from the Roman Empire to Burgundian and Frankish kingdoms - until it was acquired by Italy in the 11th century. The now busy motorway, which runs from the Po Valley to the Great and Little St. Bernhard passes, is revealed through the timeless eyes of a historian. At the same time, the documentary sheds light on cultural traditions and contemporary life in the region.

This is a small, intense film based on Schoenberg’s opus of the same name with the subtitle “danger, fear, catastrophe”. It deals with emerging fascism and the persecution of Jews, as well as with their historical continuities.

This work produced by Swedish television, where Swedish kids reads texts written by Japanese kids about their experiencing of and surviving the bombings. In the film we see images/drawings painted by these children. Nestlers inspiration comes from the book Children of the A Bomb "Five years after the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, a Professor of Education at Hiroshima University organized a project to preserve for the record the stories of those who had been on the receiving side of that catastrophic explosion. (Martin Grennberger)

A short pamphlet based on a text by Peter Weiss and on the contrapuntal use of the relation between image and sound. The commercial activities and fantasies linked to tourism in Sweden are contradicted by the geopolitics of capitalist imperialism, in particular with the war in Vietnam.

For more than eight decades, German Sinti and Roma experienced injustice. The film tells of the family of activist Romani Rose, their resistance and insistence on justice. The painful story of a minority between trauma and self-assertion. The two-part film deals with various forms of resistance by German and Austrian Sinti and Roma over eight decades. It is about rebellion against injustice and the insistence on dignity and justice.