Echo

At night, a convoy of tractor crawlers rattle through the snow to groom the ski slopes. Just under 3000 metres in altitude, excavators dig into the ground using dynamite to build a reservoir for the preparation of artificial snow. Concrete blocks of apartments are springing up everywhere, while elsewhere in the mountains, young people have long since moved away and old people talk about how their hometown no longer has a future. Too many regions in the Alps have become dependent on hopelessly commercialized skiing. In PEAK, Hannes Lang observes the invasion and hostile takeover of the Alps by ski tourism and introduces us to the people affected: winners and losers, enthusiasts, sceptics and lost souls.

What is money? What are debts? What are the consequences of both? And how can images be found for them? In Oeconomia, Carmen Losmann undertakes a journey in the strategic heartlands of neoliberal policy.

A film about the American artist Mark Lombardi who created graphic artwork laying out the powers and opaque network of the global elites from the economic and finance sectors, as well as terrorists; and whose masterpieces crossed wires with the FBI after the attacks on September 11th. Lombardi had hung himself one year earlier in his New York studio. Who was this Mark Lombardi, a man whose work was so explosive that even terrorist hunters were using it as research? The film portrays an incredibly brilliant artist who took on the social function of a watchdog by using public information and arranging it to expose the grand illegal practices in the globalized world.

X is a cinematic ritual aimed at appeasing the ancestral spirits of the industrial workforce. The film is inspired by the lives of the filmmaker’s father and grandfather, who also play the lead roles.

Since the dawn of time, the inhabitants of the Alps have used their own language to overcome the distance imposed by the mountainous orography. Riafn is a sort of dialect based on the different forms used by the shepherds and farmers of this area to call their beasts. The inhabitants of the mountains have thus cadenced their day-to-day life on calls to animals, the mooing of the cows, songs and the echo of the mountain. A sort of Alpine orchestra that helped them to cope with isolation.

The chimneys of the numerous power plants located in North Rhine-Westphalia emit a continuous stream of white clouds.

In the light of the current transformations within the global power structure, I WANT TO SEE THE MANAGER traces the linkage of economic ascent and decline in seven paradigmatic episodes. India, Bolivia, China, USA, Italy, Thailand, Venezuela - each place contains fragments of another; each episode bears testament to the hopes and fears of its protagonists. By juxtaposing these local experiences in the face of global economy, the film questions the notion of rise and decay.

Portrait of the American artist Al Hansen, who lived in Cologne from 1983 to 1995. On June 19, 1995, the New York artist Al Hansen dies in his studio in Cologne's Südstadt district. He is not found immediately. On the one hand, it is not unusual for Hansen to disappear for a few days; on the other, he lies buried under his work table, covered in materials and garbage. He died at the age of 67 while working on a collage of matches. "Al Hansen - The Matchstick Traveller" portrays an artist who was everything at once: beat poet, pop artist, performer, Fluxus artist, book author, porn publisher, actor, composer, punk manager - an interface of all post-war movements and yet an outsider.