Meike Martens

Lixue doesn’t ask herself if she likes Recife. She certainly doesn’t want to ask whether her new city likes her, after being sent there to live with her aunt. Aunt Lili owns an emporium of shops for Chinese import products and lives with her family and her workers on the 22nd floor of an exclusive apartment building. Much to the disapproval of the upper-class Brazilian landlords, who think the Chinese immigrants don’t belong in the tower. When Lixue disappears from the city, Ah arrives on the scene: the first tourist in Recife in years.

Socio-geographic explorations on the periphery of Addis Ababa, run through by a variety of borders and rifts – between agrarian and urban spatial practices, between economic and linguistic floes, between perspective and dilemma. A polyphonic audiovisual narrative of people who are forced to experience the impetuous urbanisation of African societies the hard way, recorded as a case study that expands into a complex allegory.

A young girl is cured of her epilepsy just as summer vacation is about to begin. During her last days with her classmates, she’ll come to experience life in a new way. Arranged as a series of elliptical tableaux, this haunting narrative from Luise Donschen (Casanova Gene) captures a simultaneous sense of discovery and disorientation as it proceeds from the confines of the classroom to a wider world of adolescent anxieties.

Game Girls follows Teri and her girlfriend Tiahna as they navigate their relationship through the chaotic world of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, aka the “homeless capital of the U.S.”

CONSEQUENCE tracks the tiring working day between Christmas Eve and New Year at a small German crematorium operating 24/7.

In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime.

Documentary by Thomas Heise.

Documentary by Thomas Heise.