Nele Dehnenkamp

Elderly residents of the LGBT-friendly Julie Roger Home in Frankfurt enjoy visits from male strippers, baking transgender Christmas cookies and Sunday dance events with an emphasis on spring fever. At the elderly home, seniors of all sexual orientations are welcomed to express their sexuality during the last days of their lives. The short documentary WE WILL SURVIVE observes the funny, heart-warming and at times delicate everyday life at Julie Roger Home.

In Afghanistan Amena Karimyan founded the astronomical group Kayhana – which is Persian for “little universe.” Using a self-built model of the planets, she encourages young girls to reach for the stars. After the radical Islamic Taliban seized power, she was forced to flee the country and is now struggling to build a new life in Germany. Since girlhood, this young Afghan has dreamt of flying to the moon – a dream that suddenly seems within her grasp yet remains impossible to achieve. Stuck between the burden of her past, German bureaucracy and her own ambitions, Amena embarks upon a mission to find her place on earth. In atmospheric images of this and other worlds, Little Universe portrays an ambitious Afghan woman who questions our perceptions of refugee women.

“Guess what we’re doing! We’re going to practice swimming.” Hanan accompanies her brother to classes in the public pool. The first swimming badge is called the Seahorse, their instructor explains, because it “stands” in the water and doesn’t drown. When Hanan’s family came to Europe in a rubber dinghy, she couldn’t swim. To forget this experience, she learned not to go under in the water – like a seahorse.

At the beginning Michelle Bastien-Archer shows and comments on photos of her wedding. The African-American and her childhood friend Jermaine were married in the unhospitable visitors’ hall of Sing Sing in 2007. He had been sentenced to 22 years to life for voluntary manslaughter in 1998. Ever since, she has been fighting tirelessly to prove his innocence. Now new documents have turned up that reinforce doubts about the trial’s decisive witness statement. Michelle becomes more confident. She presses even more determinedly ahead with her efforts to get Jermaine released. The camera is with her as if live, for almost a decade.