Earthbound

The film depicts life in Nepal’s leper colonies, where leprosy, now curable, is seen as a divine curse. During the monsoon, when gods leave the Kathmandu Valley, people face afflictions like leprosy. Nepal has 170,000 cases, with many severely disabled and ostracized due to fear and religious beliefs. Lacking support and medical care, they end up as beggars in cities.

The Australians call the endless deserts in the interior of the continent the "dead heart". Here lies the town of Birdsville, 23 houses and a bar with a liquor license. The long-awaited telephone connection arrived in 1979, 90 years after it had been applied for. For one weekend, this place at the end of the world turns into a cauldron when 5,000 Australians, tired of civilization, invade for the annual horse race, the "Birdsville Cup". They come in buses, off-road vehicles, motorcycles and sports planes and have become a veritable plague. Because here, everyone can do what they've always wanted to do: for example, get drunk until they drop and never get up again. The collective mass drinking reaches its peak on Saturday night. By Monday morning, the fun is over. What remains is a village with 23 houses, a bar and a street littered with 80,000 empty beer cans.

Franz Woyzeck, the protagonist of Georg Büchner's unfinished drama is incorporated in this adaption of a classic. The contemporary Franz Wodzeck lives in Germany's Ruhr industrial region. Wodzeck meanders back and forth between the monotony of working each day in a car factory and returning each evening to the cheerless desolation of the factory dormitory. Once his girlfriend, Maleen, snubs him for his boss, Wodzeck's personal and social frustrations escalate into a vista of emotions: he runs amok and bloodily stubs Maleen to death. After he has killed his one sole love Wodzeck resigns himself to his fate. A hollow shell of a man is admitted to a psychiatric asylum. He feels no more anxiety, no more desire. He simply exists. FBW Prädikat: "wertvoll".

Travelers have wandered the Irish countryside for centuries. They were tinsmiths, harvesters and migrant laborers, fortune- and story-tellers, horse-traders and peddlers, knife grinders and scrap dealers, always performing a welcome chore for the settled society. As the centuries went by the so called tinkers adjusted their lifestyle to the changing conditions. Today, however, their traditional life on the road is coming to an end. "Rules of the Road" is a contemporary road movie forgoing the familiar cliché of romantic escape. Instead it focuses on Irish travelers who not only herald a sweeping economic migration, but also are the living exponents of an odyssey. An odyssey reflecting the state of mind in an absolute industrial society. The Irish travelers have no place to go. And they never had a place there they could stay. —Oliver Herbrich

The autobiographical portrait of Theo Berger, who gained notoriety as the king of burglaries and escapes and spent most of his life in prison. His criminal career includes over 150 crimes committed since the age of 18. Theo Berger was sentenced twice to 15 years and twice to preventive detention. The film was made during his parole, which he received after contracting leukemia. But less than six months after filming was completed, Theo Berger was arrested again. Unprepared for a life in freedom, he was involved in a bank robbery. He was sentenced to a further 12 years in prison.

The Robber Mathias Kneißl became a legend in Bavaria. The film is based on the historical criminal case and describes the last year of the rebel and folk hero. At the age of 23, he is released from prison, where he has served an unreasonably harsh six-year sentence. When this becomes known, he loses his job as a carpenter and now wants to emigrate to America with his girlfriend. He hopes to earn the money for the journey by committing crimes. In the process, he fatally wounds a gendarme. Despite this, Mathias Kneißl does not leave the area and stays in the Dachau hinterland. Only when his girlfriend betrays him is he able to find his hiding place. The farm was besieged by 300 police officers for days and then shot up. Kneißl was seriously injured and treated in a clinic in Munich before being beheaded in Augsburg in 1902.

'Thinking machines' and 'people thinking as machines' (super-computerprogrammers who have internalized computerese) are perhaps two of a kind. But clashes with the 'real world' are preprogrammed for these machines of flesh and blood. The film traces humankind's striving to discover itself again in its mechanical creations, from the effort to construct automatons in Switzerland some 200 years ago, to a pinnacle display of the 1980ies achievements: a robot playing Haydn's 'Genesis' at the World Expo in Japan.