Sebastian Winkels

A focus on the inner workings of a political party making headlines at district, state and national level as an “alternative for Germany”. Thanks to the film’s striking objectivity, it becomes clear where argument ends and contradictions begin.

Every year, five to ten percent of all deceased Berliners are buried by the authorities because no relatives are found. Most of them are put into the ground by mortician Bernd Simon going alone. But sometimes companions do turn up and say goodbye in their very own way. An observational documentary about an undertaker who actually wanted to become an entertainer, a bizarre city portrait and a mirror of how we deal with death, mourning and commemoration.

They meet in »Le Vieux Belleville«: Minelle, the singer, or Robert Bober, the writer, once Truffaut's assistant director. Basque anarchist Lucio is also a regular at the little restaurant, where time seems to have stood still. This place and the memories of the regulars and their songs which tell of love and struggle are the manifestation of the soul of Belleville, but also of old Paris.

In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin color is merely a coincidence. As a teenager, she accidentally discovers the truth. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Sigrid, an East German woman, fell in love with Lucien from Togo and became pregnant. But she was already married to Armin. The child is Togolese-East German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. In interviews with Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents, striving for normality, developed following her birth. What sounds like fieldwork about social dislocation becomes an autobiographical essay film and a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, viewed from a very personal perspective.

My mother googles the film hero of her youth: Helmut Berger. She is shocked: only an addicted shadow of the former icon seems to be left. She decides to halt the obvious catastrophic decline of the once “most handsome man in the world”. As a consequence, this one-time god of the screen is suddenly sitting on my mother’s sofa in Nordsehl in Lower Saxony. And he stays put - for several months. While he trustingly rolls out his whole life before us, the dividing lines between film team, world star and family intermingle. This is a film about ageing, rising and falling - and about the fact that it is sometimes possible to regain an element of dignity in life.

Talking Money is an observational documentary shot at bank consultation tables all over the world. Weaving stories from eight countries into one global money conversation, it virtually transforms the cinema into a bank. Purely experiential! Who are we when we talk about money? Far from the glamour of distant Wall Street, this is the reality of personal banking, where one’s life problems become a matter of business. A heartfelt comment on capitalism revealing how the invisible power of money works on all of us, no matter who and where we are.

The filmmaker, Simon Brückner, goes in search of his long-deceased father, one of the central figures of the German students' movement. A picture of a multi-faceted character emerges and a piece of German history is retold.

A Documentary about Seven Brothers.

A short directed by Sebastian Winkels.

A short directed by Sebastian Winkels.

A short directed by Sebastian Winkels.

The film project under the working title of "Nightwalk" about the jazz music of the Afro-American Cassandra Wilson, was born of the idea to really create a fusion between music and pictures. The film team concentrate the contents of the film on the actual theme of the music, "Children of the night". This is not, however, a conventional plot rather an atmospheric series of pictures surrounding a figure who is wandering through the city streets at night.