It Works!

In 2019, Union Berlin was promoted to the Bundesliga. Four years later, the traditional East German club qualifies for the Champions League and achieves something that few would have thought possible. Despite all the euphoria over the triumph, the pressure to remain strong in sporting and economic terms also increased, as did the fear of falling into a conflict of identity between tradition and change. The fact that the soccer underdog from Köpenick still manages to retain its magic is primarily down to the people who work behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly and enthusiastically. Always at their side: a loyal fan base that is prepared to follow their club's path unconditionally. Hendel follows the team behind Union for almost two years, right up to their entry into the top flight, and takes a unique, particularly personal and authentic look behind the scenes of the club.

A pack of strays – seven dogs and one woman live in the shadows of Moscow. Hidden from the totalitarian authorities, two species share their existence on the verge of disappearance. They are straying in constant restlessness through a savage landscape where the city is cracking. Shot from the animal’s point of view, patterns of mutual dependence and taming begin to blur.

Documentary about poet Sascha Anderson.

Director Annekatrin Hendel delivers a portrait of three generations of Brasches as a microcosm of societal tensions being carried out on a large scale — between East and West, art and politics, communism and religion, love and betrayal, utopia and self-destruction.

With her camera in tow, filmmaker Annekatrin Hendel settles into a hotel by the sea for four weeks; with her is her old friend Ines Rastig who, after her divorce and alimony battle, is now homeless. Room service may deliver fresh fruit every day, but it’s the moment of truth for these two women as they humorously and unsparingly scrutinise practical problems after the end of a long marriage.

Documentary about the terrorist attack on the Berlin discotheque "La Belle" in 1986.

Sven Marquardt might be the most famous bouncer worldwide. But beside standing in front of the legendary techno club Berghain in Berlin, he is also a well-known and skilled photographer. Long before the Berlin Wall came down, Marquardt portrayed the subcultural East-Berlin scene. His black and white photography illustrates it as voluptuous, laid-back, dirty and existential. Even if shot by daylight, his work is permeated by darkness, ecstasy and night.

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. A legend says that she returned to Earth as a ghost and still roams the streets of Moscow alongside her free-drifting descendants. While shooting this film, the directors little by little realised that they knew the street dogs only as part of our human world; they have never looked at humans as a part of the dogs’ world.

The story of the complex man and 75-year-old writer named Paul Gratzik, who worked as a Stasi informant in the GDR and was known as a “man of extremes”. However, after spying on friends and colleagues for more than 20 years, Gratzik decided to voluntarily expose himself in the 1980s.

Over a period of nine years, this documentary observes the Kartoffelkombinat, a community supported agriculture co-op in Munich, on its way to becoming Germany’s largest agricultural cooperative. The efforts of the organization’s two founders have been in service of a grander vision: finding an alternative to the capitalist mode of production. But the road there is rocky, and suddenly the project is on the verge of failure.

Documentary about German town Demmin where hundreds of people commited suicide at the end of WWII.

In her documentary, director Sabine Michel revisits her own experiences during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany's subsequent reunification, as well as those of her four friends Claudi, Vera, Claudia and Veruscha. The five women were about 18 years old at that time, and belonged to the last school class in Dresden to graduate in the German Democratic Republic. The country and society school had prepared them for suddenly ceased to exist, thus they had to completely start anew. More than twenty years later, the five women travel to Paris together. During the train ride, they talk about their former dreams and aspirations, and how different their lives turned out to be.