On the vast plains of Kyrgyzstan, men have been practising the team sport of buzkashi, for centuries. The aim of the game is to steal the trophy of a dead goat from the rival team of riders while staying on horseback. Into this tough masculine world enters Atirkül, a woman with an enterprising spirit. Her ambition is to find local men to form her own team.
Petra Kelly was one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century. She fought for a world without weapons and nuclear energy, for a society at one with nature. She was co-founder of Germany’s Green Party – the first green party to find success. In 1992, She was murdered aged just 44. The issues she addressed are today more topical than ever before.
Civil society and the law system in Russia are under severe pressure from the state. Human rights lawyers have become the last frontier between state violence and society. Mikhail Benyash and a network of like-minded lawyers defend those who dare to speak up. They fight for justice in an increasingly suffocating dictatorship.
Immanuel Kant was already an important philosopher during his lifetime. Three hundred years after his birth, the film shows for the first time Kant’s close connection to his native Königs-berg, a place he never left. Everything he knew came from books or everyday observations. Using sophisticated animation techniques, the film takes us back to 18th-century Königsberg between Europe and the Russian Empire.
Chea Samy, a celebrated dancer at the Cambodian Royal Palace, raises a boy as her own at her home on the palace grounds. Years later, as a forced labourer under the Khmer Rouge, she realises her foster son is Pol Pot. The film tells the almost unknown story of the history and reign of Pol Pot and its connection to classical Cambodian dance.
In 2013, the young journalist Eric Lembembe was tortured and beaten to death in Cameroon. He fought for the recognition of the rights of homosexuals. Shocked by the brutal murder, the film-maker returns to his home country. While he examines his own homophobic upbringing, the film reveals that Lembembe’s murder as no isolated case.
Graphic artist Stefanie is in the middle of a creativity crisis. In a museum, she is captivated by the satirical photomontages of the world-famous artist and Nazi opponent John Heartfield. Miraculously, she finds herself in his studio. She embarks on an adventurous journey through Heartfield’s extraordinary life 100 years ago.
Hambach Forest in Germany was supposed to be cleared to expand an open-cast lignite mine. In 2018, during a large-scale police operation to evict activists occupying the forest, film student Steffen Meyn was killed in a tragic accident. Based on his film footage, we chronicle Steffen’s journey and follow him into the activists’ world.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide, driven to new extremes by the COVID crisis. This film documents the visual roots of this new anti-Semitism, taking a historical look at the visual propaganda of the Nazis.
A few years ago, everyone was talking about declining bee populations, but today beekeeping is booming. There are now so many farmed bees in Swiss cities that they are taking away food from rare wild bees and other insects. This is a problem for biodiversity. Conservationists are now campaigning for the regulation of beekeeping.
The film tells of the discovery of the world’s oldest medical manual. Georg Ebers, a German Egyptologist, came upon the 3,500-year-old work in Luxor in the late nineteenth century and carried it back with him to Saxony in a spectacular manner.
Six-year-old Nila is the product of a temporary marriage, which allows a man in Iran to be married to a woman for a pre-determined time. Children born out of these relationships do not legally exist and cannot attend school. In a system that prioritises men’s rights over women’s, Nila’s mother Leyla fights relentlessly to win custody of her daughter and secure her future.
