Dennis Hopper: Create (or Die)

In 1970, near the Ukrainian village of Chernobyl, a utopia was born: the world's largest nuclear power plant. Its inhabitants, chosen for their talent and faith in the future, lived a dream that was shattered on April 26, 1986, when the technologically obsolete plant exploded, causing thousands of victims.

Origin sticks like shit to your shoe! That's what Marlen Hobrack says, who grew up as a working-class child in Bautzen. But the promise of the old Federal Republic was that you can become anything if you just try hard enough. But that no longer applies. So is class in Germany fixed from birth? Have we long been living in a country in which origin and family background are more important for future prospects than individual performance and commitment? In Germany, it takes six generations to rise from poverty to the middle class, in Denmark only two generations. Those affected reflect on their life stories, the burden of their social origins, the wrong and right turning points for social advancement, as classified by social researchers. They talk of pride and shame, of financial hardship and wealth, of origin and future, of growing up and moving up in this Germany with its entrenched selection mechanisms for social advancement.

Documentary about Hans Zimmer.

The German filmmaker Marcus Attila Vetter has a Turkish father, Cahit Cubuk, and he goes to visit him for the first time in this documentary. He travels to the Anatolian village of Cubuk Koye, where his 72-year-old father lives with his wife and two daughters. A film crew that got there ahead of him interviews the hopeful father, who wonders what his son will be like. "If he's anything like me, he'll be warm-hearted. If he's more like his mother, the prospects are not very good." Marcus films the Turkish landscape and talks with his newly found family, who all cry many tears. Marcus's father feels that he had no choice back then but to leave Germany, and his halfsisters explain how much they missed their father when he was away. In the meantime, we hear passages read in voice-over from the diary of Marcus's mother Gerlinde, from the time that she was with Cahit - how they met, fell in love and ultimately broke up.