Peter Heller

A film about poverty in a rich country: father, mother, seven children have made it out of the homeless asylum. The author met the Cologne family B. for the first time in 1976. Living with debts, installments, reminders, living with the certainty that the children will not fare any differently. For more than twenty years, between dreams and fears, the camera recorded two generations' fear of failure and hunger for middle class. A unique film chronicle from the "latest economic miracle" - between 1976 and 1997.

The sculptor Stephan Balkenhol is a world star on the German art scene. Yet the artist has remained as down-to-earth as his figures themselves. His wooden people fetch top prices at auctions at Christie's, Sothebie's and Co. Despite the trend towards abstraction, Balkenhol rediscovered the figurative for himself. The human being in itself, snatched from the hectic everyday world, reflecting, with an empty gaze. The sensation lies in the ordinary. Against the pathos of monuments and memorials. The film takes a look into the world of Stephan Balkenhol and observes him at work - the portrait of an extraordinary artist.

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The film follows the life of a large family over three decades and generations. The rising saga of a formerly homeless family survived since the mid-seventies solely thanks to the mother's figure, the strength and bond of this "Mama General". Following her motto, "one for all - all for one," she keeps the family together and tied. And yet, it is no longer like before. One force is noticeably weakening. Mama General is dying...

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Half a trillion dollars have been spent on the international aid machine in the last 50 years and it just keeps on pumping. It's an industry that's unquestionable and supported by the world's biggest celebrities; Bono, Bob Geldof, Angelina Jolie ... But recently an increasing number of experts have begun to criticise the giving game. This doc dissects the aid industry and reveals some difficult home truths about 'Aid as Business' in the Third World.

The film shows the life of women in a tent camp on the edge of the Sahara. An old nomad woman and her daughter from the city argue about happiness - where do you find happiness, in the desert or city. Women and men in open dispute about love, suffering and passion. In an amazing way, something of the self-confidence, independence and courage of these daughters of the sand becomes palpable.

In order to expand coal mining, the traditional town of Most in the Czech Republic was razed to the ground. Old buildings were demolished, a Gothic church was relocated, nature was poisoned, people were forced out of their environment. Only in the minds of the elderly does the town live on.

A documentary film essay about war and peace against the backdrop of filmmaker Peter Heller's personal history, who grew up in the trenches of the Cold War. A reckoning with fifty years of peace—during the Cold War and beyond.

The army of the GDR, called NVA had not survived the reunification of Germany, it was completely absorbed by the Bundeswehr and scrapped subsequently. But what apparently went on so smoothly as a peaceful unification of hostile brothers quietly left deep scars in the East German landscape.

A black ethnologist explores aspects of German life in West Germany in the early 1980s with a foreign eye - and meets with rejection because she dares to look at Europeans with the same tools as they have used for centuries in Africa.

The Bavarian trio "Die Biermösl Blosn" travels to Africa with child, cones and instruments to compare themselves with the music world there.

With its rich silver mines, the medieval town of Jáchymov had given its name to the dollar. A few centuries later, the town gave face to the horror of Soviet terror in Central Europe. The film tells of the second and terrible face of the old and idyllic spa town of Jáchymov in the uranium-rich, Bohemian Ore Mountains - a small town that survived despite communist labor camps for Soviet atomic bombs.

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The film tells the story of three women from the sultan's harem in an African kingdom, from three different generations, and documents 100 years of change: interventions of Islam and Europeans, tensions and contradictions between traditional identity and the lifestyle of today's black bourgeoisie.

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The start of a long-term observation of the Bronnmann family from Cologne, who have seven children - what are their concerns, plans, and dreams?

Else, a half-breed child from the secretive harem of the German colonial elite, is the daughter of the governor's deputy Jesko von Puttkammer, who disappeared to faraway Germany. Else became an old woman who had suffered all her life from remaining fatherless. The film finally confronts Else's only half-sister from German nobility with the mulatto sister-in-law from Africa.

A documentary about a village on Lake Maggiore where only one of the original residents remains, while many houses have been bought up by German and Swiss tourists. A compelling cinematic documentary that captures the perspectives of the new residents—including the filmmakers themselves—and their relationship with the Italians, while offering a (self-)critical examination of tourism in its various forms.

Fast food versus food culture. In the form of a documentary grotesque, the stylized, rationalized, and industrialized triumph of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and others around the world is portrayed.