Ulrike Tortora

CHADDR is a feature documentary about a 17-year-old girl Stanzin. Her home town in the heart of Himalaya in Kashmir is facing big changes: Global warming and technological progress change the lives of people rapidly. Until recently children had to follow dangerous mountain pass every year to get from their home village to school. It takes Stanzin 4 days to get to school. The times are changing and the dangerous mountain pass will be turned into an autoroute. The director Minsu Park follows Stanzin on her last way to school, before she graduates and leaves her hometown forever.

Four female artists have been politicized by experiences with war, violence and suppression and integrated them into their work, using their most personal tool: their own bodies.

Marie, Arthur, Emine, and Christian are ten years old. They live in Berlin. Strolling through the city with them, we experience their freedom as well as first notions of opposition.

What is our relationship to our pets and why do people try to get as close as emotionally possible to them? Jonas Spriestersbach creates a series of unsettling vignettes that highlight some deeply disturbing but also outlandishly funny behavior patterns between humans and their desire to project themselves in their furry friends. But what does this tell us about our behavior?

Amidst the preparations for her 35th wedding anniversary, Meredith is surprised by the discovery that she is HIV-positive. Only her husband André could have been the carrier of the virus.

Darío Aguirre moved from Ecuador to Germany to be with Stephanie, but from the very first day there was a third party in their relationship:the government. They issued him ten visas in fifteen years. A long trail of papers, stamps, permits, and restrictions connected Darío to Germany while also keeping him at a distance. Then one fine day the mayor of Hamburg invites Darío to become a German citizen. A confession of love? Darío responds with a tender, ironic road movie that traces his intertwined journey from the country of his fathers to the country of his children.

In the summer of 1976, a shared family yard becomes the setting, as the adults bicker over selling the garden and the kids are free to explore the mysterious neighboring lot. Then they hear about a girl that has disappeared...

Isi doesn't get the world anymore. Just a short while ago, life was wild, fun, and without obligations, but suddenly everyone around her seems to be grown-up and successful. With her diploma in one hand and a drink in the other, she is stuck between the careless days of college and real life. When her best friend Lotte gets a respectable job and becomes pregnant, Isi realizes that she needs to find a way to start living a life on her own.

The documentary depicts the remarkable phenomenon of the national competition Kalina Krasnaya, organised with a flourish in which the convicts from all over Russia sing their way to victory with songs about longing, war, love and forgiveness.

The documentary tells the story of Uschi, a farmer living free and recluded in the bavarian alps. Shot in epic black and white pictures, Still follows Uschi's life over a ten year period. From an untroubled summer of making cheese through pregnancy and the uncertain future of the parental farm, Matti Bauer portrays Uschi's struggle to keep alive the dream of a way of life that has become rather untypical in this day and age.

An intimate drama based on actual cases about a woman who murdered her own child. Interviewed by a psychiatrist, she recounts how she got in a seemingly hopeless situation which led her to believe that the killing of her child and a subsequent suicide where the only solution left. As more and more fragments of her desolate life are revealed, it becomes evident that the psychiatrist is also keeping a dark secret, and that she has in fact more in common with her patient as the latter would have guessed.

As a child, the poet Thanh Nguyen lost his sight in an American raid. He grew up, married and had a family. When his wife fell ill, he decided to go begging around the country, accompanied by his nine-year-old daughter. Conceived as confession for two voices (father and daughter), torn by shots of absolute clarity, Vang Bong is a journey through darkness.

Silver Forest is a brutally realistic coming-of-age story, set in a small Swiss town in a bleak winter landscape. A group of boys struggle with their mounting anger with the mundane world, resulting in a string of escalating acts of violence. Deep in the forest they finally find a release for their aggression by joining a Nazi gang - only to discover the boundaries where harmless play turns into murder.

Having just landed a gig with a trendy magazine, young photographer Nadja celebrates at the local disco, where she bumps into Darius, a 20-year-old skateboarder. Although her frankness at first scares him, the two quickly become a couple, and as their intoxicating affair takes off, they seem like passionate soul mates. Soon, however, career demands and emotional intensity gradually put a strain on their rapport, and things turn even more complicated...