Das Alaska Syndrom

In 1897, Arctic explorer Robert Peary, commissioned by Franz Boas, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, brought indigenous inhabitants of Greenland back from his expedition. It was a sensation. But only little Minik survived. The rest of his group died within a few months. Minik's father died of tuberculosis; his skeleton was added to the museum's anthropological collection. Minik, adopted by museum staff, remained in America for another twelve years before returning to Greenland. But there he had become a stranger. Robert Peary, on the other hand, was celebrated in America for his North Pole expeditions. Minik could not let go of his past, so he returned to the US.

September 1943: the Special Court of Oldenburg pronounces a verdict against an office courier. The man was found guilty of absconding two bars of soap and a tin of shoe polish. As a dangerous public enemy, he is sentenced to death. More than 16,000 death sentences were passed by the Special Court and the People's Court during the Nazi era. And the judges and state prosecutors who perpetrated these injustices were back on the bench after 1945. Peggy Parnass, a Jewish journalist and a relative of victims of Nazi injustices, experienced this continuity and described many of its ramifications in more than 10 years as a court reporter. The film follows her radical, subjective viewpoint and her incredible encounters with Nazi jurists in today's courts of law.

The film follows the first Greenpeace expedition to the Antarctic on board of the Ross Sea. The film is also about the attempts of the industrialized nations to parcel out the 'last continent'.

MISSION X tracks down the mysteries that triggered spectacular turning points in our history. Alert minds with the courage to go new and different ways, with ideas and a sense of adventure, created the remarkable turns of events that were responsible for making us what we are today.

Shin Dong-Huyk was born on November 19, 1983 as a political prisoner in a North Korean re-education camp. He was a child of two prisoners who had been married by order of the wardens. He spent his entire childhood and youth in Camp 14, in fact a death camp. He was forced to labor since he was six years old and suffered from hunger, beatings and torture, always at the mercy of the wardens. He knew nothing about the world outside the barbed-wire fences. At the age of 23, with the help of an older prisoner, he managed to escape. For months he traveled through North Korea and China and finally to South Korea, where he encountered a world completely strange to him.

The third episodic film, after Deutschland im Herbst and Der Kandidat, in which notable German filmmakers reflect on the state of their country. A collage of documentary and dramatised sequences dealing with such topics as overkill, peace demonstrations, NATO arms policy, and life after the next war.

Günter Zint and companions answer questions from director Axel Engstfeld about the life and work of Hamburg's exceptional photographer. He takes the cameras and his camera into the depths of the Reeperbahn, to ordinary and extraordinary people of the era, to borderline experiences of the rule of law, anti-nuclear demonstrations and Günter Wallfraff's investigative journalism.