Directing
A radio signal attracts a team of astronauts to a mysterious planet. Once there, they are warmly welcomed by an alien race, but are soon suspicious of what is really occurring on this strange land.
A DEFA documentary celebrating the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in East Berlin in the summer of 1973. Blending reportage with staged elements, it presents the festival as a showcase of international solidarity, culture, and socialist ideals.
This documentary details the life of Klaus Fuchs who was a spy for the Soviet Union while working on nuclear research in the United States and Great Britain. It also discusses the contributions of German scientists to the atomic bomb.
A cinema-verité documentary of Ghana’s five years of independence under President Kwame Nkruma. Striking color images of Africans in modern-day jobs, such as airline pilot and construction worker, predominate, with little voice-over.
In this documentary, Joachim Hellwig uses partly unpublished footage to shed light on a dark chapter of German history and shows the entanglements between the politicians' claims to power and the interests of industry and business in Germany from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War (1914 to 1945). The Nuremberg War Crimes and Industrial Trials served as the basis for this documentary.
Hosted by futurist moderator Chris Wallasch, this playful documentary speculates on what love and relationships might look like in the year 2002. Through interviews with travelers at Berlin-Schönefeld Airport and a collage of witty flashbacks and imagined flashforwards, the film reflects on enduring questions of romance, family, and changing social norms.
Questions about ideas about the future are usually only answered in very general terms. In the "Workshop Future", everyday people have the opportunity to communicate their ideas and wishes through pictures. What will work look like in the next millennium, will everything be done by machines, what is behind the concept? Will work be more and more thinking? What will it look like in the household, what ideas do mothers have for the kindergarten of the future? Inspired by various ideas, visions of the future are to be presented together with the thinking viewer.
People discuss their ideas about the future. In the 3rd episode of the film series, the problems of money in the past and our future ideas about it are discussed. Ultimately, it is not about whether money should be abolished, but about communist needs and their satisfaction.
A six-minute DEFA short that montages lurid covers from West German sci-fi pulp—especially the Perry Rhodan series—over an electronic/musical collage (including “Glory, glory, hallelujah”) and a polemical voiceover. Framed as a warning against a U.S.-style, militarized “future,” the film critiques capitalist sci-fi imagery (spaceship battles, soldiers vs. aliens/robots) and counters with the claim that “this is not our future.”
DEFA documentary in honor of the 750th birthday of the city of Berlin.
A documentary recounting Anne Frank’s story and death at Bergen-Belsen before turning to a detailed examination of the camp itself—the routines of its officers, the atrocities committed there, and the troubling postwar reality that many perpetrators lived freely with state support in Germany.
People discuss their ideas of the future. In this 2nd episode of the film series, the problem of "beauty" in our current and future ideas is discussed. The demand for beauty is not just a demand on the arts, but on the various areas of life.
