Cassis Birgit Staudt

An anthology of eleven vignettes featuring star-studded casts of extremely unique individuals who all share the common activities of conversing while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

Eva Jensen is a female carpenter form Hamburg who wants to make a new start on the Baltic Sea coast in eastern Germany. She tries to buy a workshop with a view of the sea offered for sale by Heide, who rents out beach chairs. Unfortunately, Heide’s ex-husband vetoes the sale. In trying to understand his reasons, Eva comes across a painful family secret from the days of the GDR. And in other respects too, the newcomer from the West faces prejudice in the village, although her skills are urgently needed. Fish-seller Christian is also interested in the workshop, which Eva just sees as fair competition. Then they discover a common passion, kite-surfing, and unexpectedly grow closer.

The documentary tells of women who asserted their ambitions during the GDR era.

For the first time in their lives, Polish-Jewish twins Adam and Ida Paluch tell their incredible story of being separated at the age of three and surviving the Holocaust, growing up knowing almost nothing about each other and their family roots.

Director Peter Patzak visits and interviews friends who decided to move from Germany to Rio de Janeiro and New York City.

Mayrah is a film made from a time last summer while in Sidney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Australia was such an intense flurry of impressions, movements and environments, that the film took the form of a stone skipping across moments of this time: a series of visual memories, the surface of which both reflected some brief abstract and literal elements of my experience.

The district of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean in Brussels has become world-famous as a center of jihadism, but for six-year-old Aatos and his friend Amine, it is a familiar home. Here, they listen to spiders, discover black holes, and fight about what is going to steer a flying carpet. Together they search for the answers to life's big questions. But the brutality of the adult world makes itself known when terrorists detonate a bomb in the neighborhood. Aaatos envies Amine's Muslim faith and looks for his own gods, although his classmate Flo questions him; she is strongly convinced that anyone who believes in God is completely nuts. Gods of Molenbeek is a wonderful portrayal of childhood friendship, inquiry and the creation of meaning in a chaotic time.