Stefan Mathieu

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.

Born in 1941, Eric Burdon was – along with his band The Animals – one of the most important standard-bearers of the British Invasion of America, right after The Beatles and ahead of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks. Their 1964 interpretation of House of the Rising Sun was a global hit and inspired Bob Dylan (who recorded an acoustic version on his first album) to go electric and hit the stage from then on backed by a rock band.

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.

Get ready to rock with Simple Minds at this moody show shot in a Berlin night club. You’ll want to clap your hands and sing along to their classic hits “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” “Alive and Kicking,” and more!

Virtually every woman who enters menopause has questions about what’s happening to her body and how to effectively deal with the changes. The broad availability of medicines, remedies and even hormones even conveys the concept that menopause as a curable “deficiency disorder”. This documentary takes a look at the scientific and medical contexts of menopause as well as the latest findings in international research. Are artificial hormones medically necessary or a seductive, supposed fountain of youth? Do they truly assist in alleviating the suffering of women, or are they lifestyle drugs reflecting a zeitgeist in which ageing is no longer acceptable and older people are seen as “flawed”? A visual and provoking science documentary about the hot time of menopause that also takes a look at whether and how the hormones in men likewise go crazy.

Arte Berlin Live filming at SchwuZ.

This is the amazing story of how a group of reclusive Rhineland experimentalists became one of the most influential pop groups of all time - a celebration of the band featuring exclusive live tracks filmed at their Tate Modern shows in London (Feb 2013), interwoven with expert analysis, archive footage of the group, newsreel of the era and newly-shot cinematic evocations of their obsessions. With contributions from Derrick May, Holger Czukay, Francois Kevorkian, Neville Brody, Paul Morley, Peter Boettcher, Caroline Wood and more.