Jenny Lou Ziegel

Daniela is unsure about what to do next and where to live. Mia is finishing a master’s degree that she spontaneously started. Along with Natascha, another friend thinking of moving to Vienna, they wander around and talk.

Perhaps they should never have met, but fate wanted otherwise. Monika and Joseph. She is a curator, he is an immigrant from Congo, a businessman with an unclear past and present. They meet during a police raid at a bar, when the first of many sparks flies between them. An understated love story, a melodrama without pathos, a fragile story about the ambiguous nature of love and the impossibility of overcoming it through reason.

A Danish summer: long days turn into blue nights. A tunnel is being built to connect Denmark and Germany. Three people meet and part ways again.

An experimental documentary film of collective research into creolization, addressing its historical, ontological and cultural forces.

Loves are found and lost. Families disappear and start. Houses, denouements, solitude, friendship. All that we keep, and all that we leave behind. Shot on Super 8 film between 2010 and 2018 in Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Guinea-Bissau, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Chile, ANYTHING AND ALL records the author’s memories as the days return to normal and emotions start to weaken, exploring the little ceremonies and other manias we indulge to remember our story.

Two boys from different worlds. Of all possible times, the start of summer vacation is when 10-year-old Jona has to move away from Berlin to the German-Czech border with his mother and new stepfather. He's lonely and angry as he inspects his new surroundings. Across the border, he meets Miro, a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. Jona is fascinated by the confident but taciturn boy, only slowly discovering the fate that's hidden behind Miro's grown-up façade.

The film approaches the biographies of two women whose personalities were forcibly hidden behind their roles as wives and homemakers. They remained invisible until they themselves became the aggressors.

Borrowing its title from an experimental text by Walter Benjamin. Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?

With its image axis repeatedly tilting and tipping out of frame, Depth of Field examines three places in the German city of Nuremberg which are haunted by the memory of the racist murders committed there by the NSU far-right terrorist group between 2000 and 2005.

The first image is in black and white, upside down and projected into a black box that then becomes the frame. It now hovers like a time capsule near a man’s face. He looks down, listening in on a female guerrilla fighter and translating her words from Fulani. Within the capsule, money is counted and paid out as a new currency, the numbers of the years run backwards in the black box. A 16-mm film glides through the man's hands and is transferred to a laptop screen frame by frame.

Neukölln, a trendy district in Berlin. Living space is scarce here. Without surety, proof of credit worthiness and salary there is no chance at all now. Thies knows this game; he works for a real estate management company and watches that the rules are upheld - until he meets Bruno and Sonja. He provides the dissimilar siblings with a flat free of charge on the quiet. And enters into an affair with the brother. Step by step he becomes more deeply immersed in the secret of the "siblings". A Berlin film about a loner who gets caught up. About a couple with unclear residency status. About a city everyone wants to live in.

A character study as well as a meditation on communication, creativity, and physical space, Take What You Can Carry is a picture of a young woman seen through the interiors she occupies and the company she keeps. A North American living abroad, Lilly aspires to shape an intimate and private place of her own while connecting to the world around her. When she receives a letter from home, it provides the conduit she needs to fuse her transient self with the person she's always known herself to be.

All of a sudden, 16-year-old Martha vanishes. Her father Lothar, who for years has had no contact with her or his ex-wife, sets off unwilling to find her. He soon realises other young people are also vanishing from the city inexplicably. Lothar follows their trail across the country. He meets the occasional young person but the trail goes cold. In the next city he encounters militia groups and a reinforced police presence. Children are forbidden to be on the streets unless accompanied by adults. The world has changed...

Jessi is eleven and longs to go back to the place where she spent her early childhood. She has an important role to play in the life of her mother, who has been in prison for several months. Since her older sister Bibi broke off all contact with their mother Jessi is now her mother’s only contact to the outside world.

To take care of his father’s estate, Ulrich Meinert has to go to a trailer park where his father used to live. He finds himself in a camping colony in eastern Germany which stirs up mixed feelings. Although he felt a lot of resentment towards his father, days go by without him taking care of any unsettled business. Instead, he starts to get involved with Anja, takes on one of his father’s old friends and settles into his father’s trailer. Against his own wishes, he starts to fill the void his father left behind ...

Olga is a russian girl working as a prostitute in Germany, but one day - as she wishes - she’ll head towards Tirana for a better life...