Heide Breitel

Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.

This story is told by the boy's father: "My father wrote letters from the front. He didn't come back from the war. In my dream, I saw a hundred thousand letters falling from the sky." The letters are memories and trauma. No one talks about them. The boy knows nothing yet about the legacy of all wars. The setting for this story is a former military airfield and its surroundings.

This film tells the story of Markus Anatol Weisse, who, astonishingly enough, became an artist, in spite of being only very partially sighted. Markus also builds strange machine-like beings and wishes that he himself were a biological robot, or cyborg.

A portrait of five St. Petersburgians and their connection to The Hermitage.

No description available.

No description available.

Bodenproben focuses on the Prinz-Albrecht site, the former headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin, which was used as a rubble dump until the provisional Topography of Terror memorial was erected in the fall of 1986.

The initial idea was to make a children’s film about chocolate-covered marshmallows. How they are made, what they are made of, where they are made, who manufactures them under what conditions. The women who work on the assembly line are happy to tell us all about themselves. We are a welcome diversion. We noticed that the men have the better jobs and also earn more money. The women don’t entirely let themselves be taken in by the meritocracy. Talking, goofing off, and singing, they help each other to get through their 8-hour day. We like that. We drop the idea of a children’s film. In this film we tried out a documentary film form that deliberately does without interviews, relying instead largely on the effect of the images. From today's perspective the film alsooffers a glimpse into the history of migration in West Germany.

Documentary film about a hospice and a birthing center.

At the documentary film seminar given by Gisela Tuchtenhagen at the dffb in 1979, three documentary portraits of women were made that were combined under the title “Küche, Theater, Krankenhaus” (Kitchen, Theatre, Krankenhaus). Students Lilly Grote, Irina Hoppe and Christine Domkowski took turns at doing the camerawork, sound and editing, supported by film editing lecturer Heide Breitel. In Mulle, Heide Breitel and Christine Domkowski craft a portrait of a passionate cook who after decades of being a housewife finds fulfillment by cooking for campsites, youth workshops and the film team. [...] (Frederik Lang)

The almost exclusively female hands that used to glue scenes together in the film laboratory according to the director’s instructions were not recognised in a film’s credits. In a series of interviews, eight former film laboratory employees and their friends remember this challenging and little-acknowledged work from the early days of the analogue film age.

A documentary which looks at Heartfield primarily as a political activist working in a specific historical context. It demonstrates this relationship by the use of documentary material, such as archive footage of inter-war Germany, in juxtaposition with Heartfield's works.