Manuel Stettner

Marga is a forty-two-year-old actress who seems to have already passed the peak of her career. After starting her career in theater on the country's major stages (Volksbühne Berlin, Berliner Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater), it is becoming increasingly difficult for her to find work. Not only in theater, but also in film, it seems to be getting harder to get roles as she gets older and as a woman, especially a woman with a migrant background.

Karate, a forty-year-old woman without a relationship, contacts ten different women via dating apps from Tinder, OkCupid or Badoo and meets some of them to escape the desert of loneliness in this big city during post-pandemic times of crisis and learns a lot about life, complex relationship structures, loneliness and herself during these very different encounters.

Self-proclaimed directing talent Cowboy comes to Berlin with the aim of finally making a big movie. He confidently accepts every assignment, only for it to lead to disaster. When Cowboy meets the artist Yps and shoots an art porn film with her, he stirs up an artistic can of worms that far exceeds his amateurish qualities.

Ramba Zamba: a theater with handicapped and non-handicapped people/actresses and actors, which has been living and working on inclusive integrative togetherness impressively every day for thirty years now. The film accompanies the mentally and physically impaired actresses and actors for six months through the theatrical production of the play GOLEM, from the beginning of rehearsals to the premiere. In doing so, the film is also partly influenced by the portrayed persons themselves, quasi inclusively co-determined, by them capturing their own view and perception, their view of reality itself on film.

Franka is a punk—wild and loud—but her star is fading. Her younger sister Maya has retreated to their parents in the countryside and now lives somewhere between rubber boots, coffee on the sofa, and no desire for change. When Franka thinks she has seen their missing sister, Lilly, on the street one day, she feels compelled to at least try to “save” Maya. What follows is a chaotic road trip from Brandenburg to Berlin, a night full of arguments and laughter, old accusations, and new honesty. In the end, there is no solution, but maybe a new beginning. A raw snapshot of two women who are closer than they think.

QRT – a condensed existence of the 90s in Berlin, sleepless and aimless, analyzing the themes of the time. Techno and heroin, heroes and saints, comics and film, philosophy and performance. He turned himself into a subject of radical living, too close, too intense. This documentary approaches QRT’s life and crafts an anecdotal biography through interviews with friends who look back on their shared time up to QRT’s tragic drug-related death in ‘96. Excerpts from his texts, published posthumously by Merve Verlag, are also presented.

Kraftwerk, Björk, Rammstein or Robbie Williams on tour are not just concerts, but pop operas, the most spectacular stage events of our time. Tens of thousands make the pilgrimage to stadiums and halls to be there. But nobody knows the man in the background. Scumeck Sabottka has been a concert promoter for over 30 years. Constantly traveling, constantly negotiating, always on the lookout for the next big thing. An ex-punk from the Ruhr area who started out as a bus driver for Einstürzende Neubauten, worked his way up, came close to bankruptcy twice and then struck a deal with legendary promoters Fritz Rau and Marcel Avram.

The diagnosis: an aneurysm in the brain. Then follow two nightmarish months during which we accompany the filmmaker. An essayistic audio-visual collage, in which Sobo Swobodnik shows us what it means to live with a potentially fatal condition.