Comrade, Where Are You Today?

In 1988, 20-year-old Kirsi Marie Liimatainen travels from Finland to the GDR, to study Marxism-Leninism at the International Youth Academy. In summer of´89 the course ends and the students spread out over the world. Afew months later, the Berlin Wall falls. 24 years later Kirsi, sets out on a cinematic journey to Nicaragua, South Africa, Chile, Bolivia, Lebanon, Germany and Finland to meet up once more with her former fellow students. What remains of their dream of the liberation of the oppressed?

Daniel Schmid: Le Chat Qui Pense

When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, among others, Wenders and Fassbinder, for example as an actor in Wender’s The American Friend. He met Ingrid Caven, who was to play a diva in several of his films. This is a documentation of a part of modern European film history and a good analysis of artistry and how it corresponds to the individual behind the camera. A wealth of archival footage brings us close to many directors and actors in Schmid’s circle. If you’ve never seen a Daniel Schmid film, you are sure to want to after watching this portrait of his life.

Picture of Light

A documentary of an expedition to Churchill, Manitoba to film the Northern Lights.

Er nannte sich Surava

Hans Werner hirsch aka Surava was a journalist. He wrote about the deportation of French jews, and the Swiss government chased him because the Swiss government was Nazi-friendly. The Swiss intelligence service (Bundespolizei) knew him as a "communist jew". In fact, he worked for a left newspaper, but he wasn't a jew. Surava took his courage to write about the "censored" inhumanity in Europe.

The Spanish Civil War

Documentary series which uses film and eyewitness accounts from both sides of the conflict that divided Spain in the years leading up to World War Two, also placing it in its international context.

Les Marches de la mort

Faced with the relentless and unstoppable advance of the Soviet Red Army, from the spring of 1944 until the capitulation of the Third Reich in May 1945, the Nazis evacuated the labor, concentration and extermination camps, factories of pain and death which, during years of nightmare, they had established in the occupied eastern territories. Forced to travel enormous distances, thousands of people died along the way from hunger, thirst and exhaustion.

Vol spécial

Switzerland still carries out special flights, where passengers, dressed in diapers and helmets, are chained to their seats for 40 hours at worst. They are accompanied by police officers and immigration officials. The passengers are flown to their native countries, where they haven't set foot in in up to twenty years, and where their lives might be in danger. Children, wives and work are left behind in Switzerland. Near Geneva, in Frambois prison, live 25 illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. They are offered an opportunity to say goodbye to their families and return to their native countries on a regular flight, escorted by plain-clothes police officers. If they refuse this offer, the special flight is arranged fast and unexpectedly. The stories behind the locked cells are truly heartbreaking.

Die Reise zum sichersten Ort der Erde

Over 350,000 tons of highly radioactive waste and spent fuel rods are in temporary storage on site at nuclear power complexes and at intermediate storage sites all over the world. More than 10,000 additional tons join them every year. It is the most dangerous waste man has ever produced. Waste that requires storage in a safe final repository for hundreds of thousands of years. Out of reach of humanity and other living creatures. The question is, where? Together with Swiss-British nuclear physicist Charles McCombie, who has been searching for a safe final storage site for highly radioactive nuclear waste for thirty-five years, director Edgar Hagen investigates the limitations and contradictions involved in this project of global significance. Supporters and opponents of nuclear energy struggle for solutions whilst dogmatic worldviews are assailed by doubt

Lost in the Bewilderness

Lost in the Bewilderness is a feature-length documentary about the filmmaker’s cousin Lucas, kidnapped at age five from his native Greece, and found on the eve of his 16th birthday in the US. This story of international parental abduction, filmed for over twenty years, chronicles Lucas’s journey of growth and self-discovery, and culminates with Lucas becoming a father himself. Lost in the Bewilderness is not only a detective story but also a lyrical meditation on childhood, lost and found, and an exploration of how the themes of ancient Greek myth and tragedy, with the family at their center, are still very much alive in the modern world.

Γάζωρος Σερρών

Die Befreiung von Auschwitz

This chilling, vitally important documentary was produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The film contains unedited, previously unavailable film footage of Auschwitz shot by the Soviet military forces between January 27 and February 28, 1945 and includes an interview with Alexander Voronsov, the cameraman who shot the footage. The horrifying images include: survivors; camp visit by Soviet investigation commission; criminal experiments; forced laborers; evacuation of ill and weak prisoners with the aid of Russian and Polish volunteers; aerial photos of the IG Farben Works in Monowitz; and pictures of local people cleaning up the camp under Soviet supervision. - Written by National Center for Jewish Film

Gas Station or the Pigeons of Lahore

The parallel stories of four Pakistani immigrants in Greece become the trigger for the director to explore the story of his father, a worker in the Perama Shipyard. The background unfolds a most deadly shipwreck, Libyan immigrants found in limbo, as well as a (possibly racist) crime, which was committed during the shooting of this film.

Nos utopies communautaires

After May 1968, they experimented with communities, squats or free love, with the hope of real change. Today, at retirement age, they live in new places and promote ways of living better and growing old together. What if they were right, these former protesters whose utopias have been muted by triumphant individualism?

Somos

Juana, Mar, and Eduardo tell their stories of abuse.

Inside Prora

On the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea lies one of the most megalomaniac projects built by the Nazis. The ‘Monster by the Sea’, a colossus of brickwork that stretches for kilometres, intended as a futurist holiday resort for the inhabitants of the Third Reich. A paragon of ‘guilty architecture’. Later occupied by the communist regime, it has since the fall of the Wall fallen victim to property developers who have found it a tough nut to crack. Nico Weber’s Inside Prora uncovers the storied history of a project that symbolises the utopian intentions of modernism and the emergence of mass tourism.

Magic Matterhorn

A documentary about entertainment and home, filmed in Switzerland and California.

Gyrischachen - von Sünden, Sofas und Cervelats

A high-rise apartment built in the 1960s provides housing for 2500 people from 42 nations. Separated from the city by a river and bounded by towering sandstone cliffs, everyone attempts to live and survive in their own way. Foreigners who have a go at being Swiss, and Swiss who observe with scepticism. They meet in the corner shop run by an Iraqi living in exile, send their kids to a children’s club managed by a missionary, and old drinking mates meet regularly over a beer in the neighbourhood’s only bar. Despite all the differences, they are rather proud of the fact that they come from here.

Jeunesse Rouge: The Story of Young Communist Revolutionaries in France

"Jeunesse Rouge" is a documentary exploring young French Communist revolutionaries fighting for a just and equal society. The film follows their organizing and mobilizing, while delving into the history of the Communist movement in France. Archival footage and interviews with activists show their passionate commitment, from protests and strikes to political education. It highlights the power of youth activism and their potential to bring about change in the face of systemic inequality.

Lucie et Maintenant

In May of 1982 Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean writer and his companion in life, Carol Dunlop set out in their VW bus on a journey along the highway from Paris to Marseille that, for each of them, was to be their final one. Twenty-five years later, Océane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave set out to undertake the journey again.

Omarska

An attempt to erect a virtual memorial for the victims of the Bosnian war, using archive material, videos and statements from survivors in a 3D animation.