Andreas Höfer

The battle for the release of her son Murat from Guantanamo catapults Turkish housewife Rabiye Kurnaz from her terraced house in Bremen straight into world politics and all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington. At her side is human rights lawyer Bernhard Docke - the reserved, level-headed lawyer and the temperamental Turkish mother with a wicked sense of humour – now fighting side-by-side to get Murat out.

The real life story of East German singer and writer Gerhard Gundermann and his struggles with music, life as a coal miner and his dealings with the secret police (STASI) of the GDR.

One day she is sitting at his door. In her red wedding dress and worn-out sneakers. She does not speak his language, is actually too young for him and comes from a completely different world. She also loves different than him - and yet the two become a couple. Johnny, failed DJ and club owner from Hellersdorf, and Sophia, the Romni. Whether she really got away from her wedding, actually comes straight from Belgrade, truly loves him as she claims? Johnny does not know. And at some point he does not care. The supposed bride has conquered his heart. Then her family comes to visit ...

Philipp Halbe can not read and write. He avoids life, works in a bar at night and does not engage in serious relationships. One day when his daughter Lily, whose mother died in a car accident, is about to die, he has to face the challenges of life and fight for custody. The aim of the film is to raise awareness of the problem of illiteracy and thus to contribute to the de-tabulation.

A new dramedic documentary about what politics and democracy mean when your working in the rough business of parlamentarian tasks, assemblies and your every day live in your constituency. Are there things that need to be changed?

Ling, in his 20s, lives in Chongqing, the largest city in China. There she meets Yu, a Chinese business traveler who lives in Berlin. As a farewell, he has given her an iPhone. They start a tender relationship by phone. When Ling flies to Berlin to see Yu, another man, Marco, is waiting for her. He is Yu's German bodyguard. He should take care that Ling flies back again.

Leni, in her mid-fifties, runs the local bakery with her son in a small Swiss town. When she falls in love with a much younger Argentinean dance teacher, her world is turned upside down.

A renowned actor named Otto is the epitome of the problematic but beloved ladies man. Even when drunk he still knows more about filmmaking than does the amateur who is directing him in his latest movie. But what should the unreliable star do when a local actor joins the crew as his understudy? Comic situations arise not only because of the well-known environment, but also from an inclination to authentically capture the various relationships.

The story opens with Bica, a solvent abusing waif, trying in vain to evade the Romanian police with her infant brother in tow. Separated from her sibling she is taken to Germany, concealed in the trunk of a car. There she is trained as a thief, picking the pockets of strangers to fill those of her patron. One of her victims is the separated father of Milka, a brat with razor sharp tongue. From this unlikely start a friendship forms and Bica gets a glimpse into a world of material security, if not emotional closeness...

A nearly illiterate woman becomes one of the founders of Poland's Solidarity union.

In 1942, in Vilna, the Nazi annihilate 55,000 Jews and squeeze the 15,000 survivors in a seven blocks ghetto. The twenty-two year old sadistic commander Kittel is assigned to administrate the ghetto in the capital of Lithuania, becoming the master of life or death. When he finds the gorgeous Hayyah sneaking with one kilo of beam stolen from the German army, he sentences her to death; but when he is informed that she was a former successful singer, he decides to activate the old theater and promote shows in the ghetto. The Jew Chief of Police Gens uses the theater and a sewing factory to save as much lives as he can; in his ambiguous position, he kills Jews to save lives of others.

When you read the title ‘Summer on the Balcony’ you probably think it will be a light Berlin summer comedy but it’s not. This film is an intimate study of two women friends who come to each other because of troubles with everyday life and with men and thus try to enjoy a life based on their ideas.

1986 - The protest movement against the construction of the nuclear power plant in Brokdorf is on its last legs. Only one rural commune remains: the "Alternative Wohnkollektiv Regenbogen". For them, it could go on and on with endless consensus discussions, shearing sheep and naked communal bathing. One day, the lowland communards are joined by two city dwellers, Hanne and her son Niels. While Hanne gets used to scream therapy and raising vegetables surprisingly quickly - and even more quickly to the tantra games with commune guru Peter - Niels has less and less desire for the dogmatic commune rules. Out of defiance, he joins the violent nuclear power plant resistance, thus upsetting the tranquil chaos of the commune. The big bang, however, comes when a reactor explodes in distant Chernobyl. Exactly on the day Bobby Ewing dies, the petroleum prince from "Dallas" and series favorite of the commune.

Olaf is to take care of the family's cleaner's store, while his dad is away on a fair. In the evening he runs into three Brazilian ladies thrown out of a limousine not knowing where to go. Olaf invites them to stay with him and his deaf pot-smoking grandfather, which at first just causes some confusion as he soon is to marry his girlfriend Vera. The next day it's topsy-turvy all over.

German national election campaign 2002: Henryk Wichmann from the conservative party is fighting a lost battle in the Uckermark.

Collection of short films the summaries of which include; a foreign man moving to Italy, getting married and having a child; a four split scene short involving plot-less images of old people with television sets for heads, a beautiful woman having sex, and overall confusion; and an old man reminiscing over his youth.

16-year old Jan is absent-mindedly strolling through the streets when he's run over by roller-skating Nina. As fast as she has stormed into his life, however, she rushes off again. Nina is 15 years old and full of crazy ideas. She lives together with her brother, her father and his new girlfriend. Her mother isn't in touch much. That's why there is the unconventional Angel whose own daughter disappeared years ago and who is Nina's best friend and substitute mother.

In the last house just behind the western borders of Russia, between Paris/Texas and Korleput/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Cindy Sherman, Dogma 95 and Duma 2000, Frank Castorf directs his virst video production "Dämonen" ("Demons") as a sort of post-Soviet-panslavistic panopticon in his own dramaturgy based on Dostojewski's "Demons" and Camus' "The Posessed". All that in set designer Bert Neumann's industrial-designed bungalow (with swimming pool) built onto forbidding landscape.

Rita Vogt is a radical West German terrorist who abandons the revolution and settles in East Germany with a new identity provided by the East German secret service. She lives in constant fear of having her cover blown, which unavoidably happens after the German re-unification.

The Pope is in town and the night of his stay is anything but heavenly for some of Berlin′s inhabitants. Rich and poor, down-and-outs and policemen, street kids and taxi drivers - in their search for a little bit of happiness, they all end up on an amusing and at times harrowing odyssey through the labyrinth of the big city.

A young, naive and enthusiastic theater director named Kai comes to a grim provincial town to put on Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Although the lethargic theater company shows no interest in the play, his spirit remains undaunted.Meanwhile, it is fall 1989. The world is changing and somewhere, far away in the capital, a revolution is taking place and it seems that wishes might come true. Great hopes emerge in the little town and unexpected events overtake Kai's mutating production.

A sensitively told Encounter between a Turkish migrant worker and a woman from East-Berlin, shortly after the fall of the wall - full of incertainty and situational comedy.

A desolate provincial railway station and six People waiting for the late connecting train to the main station. About itchy feet and the longing of the locked in in October 1989, when the big turn of November was not in sight yet.

A documentary on day-to-day life of a small GDR-Brigade in Zimbabwe educating young Africans as construction workers. Best intentions meet exported narrow-mindedness.

A Little Boy in the ruins of World War II and the white lie of an old man - after a story by Wolfgang Borchert.

Susanne and Dieter are 20 years old. They have just got a Baby. Family life could start now, but Dieter has to join the army. The film accompanies him the first six weeks, shows doubts, insights and hardly acceptable conditions. A little realistic view into the National People's Army shortly before the fall of the wall.

GDR, the last working day of an industrial worker between loud machines, shower cabins and life prospects agains all reason.

A 2006 German documentary film directed by Pamela Meyer-Arndt about three East German female photographers Sibylle Bergemann, Gundula Schulz Eldowy, and Helga Paris. The women talk about their experiences making art in the East, and what it was like to work during time when every photographer working on their own in the GDR had entire photographic works and book projects hidden away in drawers, certain that they would probably never be shown publicly.