Dearest readers and users of this catalogue, - German Documentaries

MY LIFE WITH CARLOS
by Germán Berger Hertz ORAL HISTORY | HUMAN RIGHTS | PORTRAIT | EXILE | POLITICS | PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW
On October 19th 1973 Carlos Berger Guralnik was killed along
with 70 other opponents in the Chilean Atacama desert by
Pinochets 'caravana de la muerte' (Death Convoy). His body has
never been found. Of Carlos only the remembering of his family
is left. Thirty years later his only son, Germán Berger Hertz, traces
the life and death of Carlos. The documentary is a personal
search of a son for his father, in which the turbulent history of
Chile is reflected until today.
German title: MEIN LEBEN MIT CARLOS
90min | HD | 16:9 | color & b/w |
original Spanish/English version with English subtitles available
In the summer of 1938, German painter and landscape photographer Alfred Ehrhardt and his wife
Lotte travelled to Iceland. Ehrhardt, a former Bauhaus student and one of the most important of the
New Objectivity photographers, was looking for artistic form in nature and the fundamental forms of
art. The film follows Ehrhardt's expeditions to Iceland, the Mudflats and the Curonian Spit and uses his
wonderful photographs to address the question posed by Cees Noteboom: "Something in nature, and
not by design, radiates a great beauty. But whose beauty is it? That of nature or of the photographer's
work?" NATURE BEFORE US is a rediscovery of Alfred Ehrhardt's long-forgotten work at a time of global
environmental crisis when its message could not be more appropriate: "Creation is not a matter of
a few days at the beginning of time. Creation is taking place constantly and everywhere. We exist in
its midst and contribute to it constantly."
German title: DIE NATUR VOR UNS
80min | DigiBeta | 16:9 | color & b/w | English and German version
Festivals: Wiesbaden, Sao Paulo
OFF WAYS
by Uli M. Schueppel MUSIC | BERLIN | GERMAN -REUNIFICATION | CULTURE
At noon on December 21st , 1989 the members of EINSTUERZENDE NEUBAUTEN – a band then hailed
as West-German cult export – hit the road in West Berlin for their very first concert in East Berlin,
capital of the GDR.
And as yet, it is a long, unusual way from Berlin Kreuzberg to Berlin Lichtenberg, into the Wilhelm
Pieck-Hall of the industrial plant VEB Elektrokohle. As yet there is the wall and as yet there are border
controls…
Filmmaker Uli M Schueppel, a friend of the band, accompanied EINSTUERZENDE NEUBAUTEN throughout
this ‘extraordinary’ day – extraordinary for the musicians who for the most part had grown up
in West Berlin and who previously had never been granted an official permit to perform in the GDR.
Extraordinary, because the concert in the evening had been pulled off through mediation of GDR playwright
Heiner Mueller, who was friends with Blixa Bargeld at that time, and who also would introduce
the concert with a short speech. The fact, that he appeared backstage with a delegation of French
ministers (amongst them then Culture Minister Jack Lang) belongs to the bizarre side occurrences of
this day…
But most notably, this concert is also an extraordinary event for the GDR audience, which associated
much with the name and concept of EINSTUERZENDE NEUBAUTEN, and which was suddenly – facing
the band and the West – confronted with their projections. What happened back then, on that particular
day – ‘in between’? This film now conflates these ways of West and East. 20 years later some of
the concertgoers trace those paths that led them to the concert hall of the VEB Elektrokohle.
Sometimes from around the neighbourhood, sometimes from Berlin’s surroundings, or even from
barracks 300km away – retrospectively they reflect this way, which on the one hand led them to this
once-in-a-lifetime pop event, and at the same time to the German reunification.
Out of these various Western/Eastern ways to the concert emerges a temporal mosaic of Berlin on this
‘extraordinary’ day – a journey back to a German ‘in between-time’.
German title: VON WEGEN
Festivals: Berlinale / PANORAMA
91min | HD-CAM SR | original German version with English subtitles available
538
german documentaries 2009
Production:
Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion
Heinrich-Roller-Str. 15
10405 Berlin | Germany
tel.: +49 (0) 30-69566910
fax: +49 (0) 30-69566915
info@gebrueder-beetz.de
www.beetz-brothers.eu
NATURE BEFORE US
by Niels Bolbrinker ARTS | NATURE | CULTURE | PHOTOGRAPHY
Contact:
filmtank gmbh film + medienprod.
Lippmannstr. 53
22769 Hamburg, Germany
tel.: +49 (0) 40-4318610
filmtank@filmtank.de
Contact:
schueppel-films
Uli M.Schueppel
Husemannstr. 33
10435 Berlin, Germany
tel.: +49 (0) 30-4429457
info@schueppel-films.de
www.schueppel-films.de
©Fritz Brinkmann