Rent Eats Soul

By means of objects, photos, tapes and films, director Angelika Levi, half-German, half-Jewish, examines the story of her family. The film deals with trauma and the way history is produced, filed away, turned into discourse and ordered on macro and micro levels.

Nadine is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing, until she hears someone else singing and everything falls back into place again. A melancholic observation of two young couples having difficulties trusting one another. They are full of skepticism and searching for a purpose in life.

A young photographer has fallen in love with his girlfriend's sister, throwing the trio into chaos.

The mythical figure of Srikandi, a female figure from the Indian Mahabharata epic that changes gender to live and fight as an equal among men, is the inspiration and role model for this anthology of stories on the state of alternate sexualities in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. The result is eight highly personal and profound perspectives on lesbian, bisexual and trans-identity life in Islamic Indonesia.

The workers of a self-managed tea factory decide to go against the grain and play by their own rules. The problem is, how can you plan, work and survive in a world driven by ruthless competition? One day at a time, for instance. In a world ruled by profit and dominated by the exploitation of the weaker ones, the film literally offers an alternative set of ways about how to think our future and the means and tools to work for it. It is not an easy job but, as Taste of Hope carefully and precisely shows, there is still a lot that can be done if we change our relationship to production and labor. Instead of making grand gestures or political statements, the filmmaker works with the camera and with a thoughtful editing in order to understand how to weave together new possibilities of communal existence.

An german experimental film about the party culture of Berlin in the 1980s

A portrait of photographer Abisag Tüllmann (1935-1996). Abisag Tüllmann’s photographs have become deeply engraved into our cultural memory. Using more than 500 black-and-white photos, all of which taken by Abisag Tüllmann, this cinematic tribute places her life and work in the context of the 1960s to the 1990s. Claudia von Alemann tries to get close to her friend via pictures and archival documents, excerpts from films by Carola Benninghoven, Helke Sander, Alexander Kluge, Günther Hörmann, and Ulrich Schamoni, via the music of composer José Luis de Delás, and via letters and memories, such as those of photographer Barbara Klemm, who still vividly remembers her former Frankfurt colleague.

After the short story of Franz Kafka “Unhappiness”. A young woman is visited by a ghost while vacuuming. Suddenly, her apartment is located in the cellar. They argue and the ghost leaves. 2 parallels meet in the infinite, says the one: “Go out of my way, you seem to have strayed.” Says the other: “For thousands of years I’ve been looking for a formula to find you, please do not send me away again.” The first one is already slightly pissed: “The destiny of a parallel is to be eternally alone, on the way to infinity.” “No, no,” the second one desperately screams: “One parallel is nothing, alone you are only an undefined line.“

Benji was brought from Namibia to the GDR in 1979 as a young child and sent back in 1990 after German reunification. Levi got to know him there in 1991. Two years later, he hitchhiked back to Europe disguised as a tourist. But "in this film there is no main character. Benji, who should have been it, has disappeared," it is stated at the beginning of the movie. On her search for traces, Levi associatively links the story of the refugee with the stories of flight of those she meets underway. The journey leads from Germany to Namibia, to the Spanish mainland and the Canary Islands, all the way to Senegal. Without wanting to draw a geographical or political map, an essayistic documentary on the various forms of traveling emerges: vacation and migration, voluntary and forced return.