Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB)

In the 15th century, a young goatherd living alone in a mountain hut feels a dark presence in the woods.

In the Georgian riverside town of Kutaisi, summertime romance and World Cup fever are in the air. After a pair of chance encounters, pharmacist Lisa and soccer player Giorgi find their plans for a date undone when they both awaken magically transformed with no way to recognize each other.

A depiction of the Wrangelkiez neighbourhood in Berlin. The people portrayed tell their life stories. One woman came to the neighbourhood a decade ago to work in Berlin’s still unfinished Brandenburger Airport, one man reminisces his childhood on a Tobacco farm in Kentucky, another speaks of an exceptional day in an otherwise monotonous workplace. These portraits are interwoven with the story of Elpi, a Greek woman who is waiting for the long overdue visit of an old important friend. The outcome of this mixture is a film which captures the lives and perspectives of some of Wrangelkiez’s most commanding citizens, while at the same time evoking the loss that change and time passing means for places and for people.

Jakob, a young policeman from a remote village, has his world unhinged when a stranger in a dress emerges from the forest and begins killing villagers with a sword.

Martin leaves his protective parents’ home and comes to Berlin as a law student with high hopes. He finds a tiny, run-down flat in a strange, dark apartment block, from which the previous tenant has disappeared without a trace. Having no luck with social contacts at the university, Martin quickly falls for his mysterious landlady Simone, who lives just next door behind a thin wall. Hoping to find trust and intimacy, Martin loses himself in the house’s disturbing world of sex and violence. Deep in the walls, Martin discovers the true horror of his first love.

Real estate agent Christian travels the countryside scouting for investment prospects. In a forgotten, seemingly abandoned village far off the main roads, he finds more than he is looking for. Getting entangled in an encounter with a taciturn teenage farmhand, he confronts his sexual frustrations and, in the process, gets drawn into the undergrowth of a bloodthirsty rustic community.

After many years apart, Emilie meets her brother Jakob again. She not only shares her sadness about the loss of their parents with him, but also a secret...

A girl roams through the city looking for a place to sleep. Along the way she meets young mothers who celebrate motherhood religiously, goes home with an abstinent existentialist for whom sex is “just another market”, and waits for the end of capitalism in a drag bar. Her attempt to write a book doesn’t make it beyond the first sentence of the second chapter, and she finds no space between art galleries, yoga studios and the beds of strangers. Instead of trying to fit in, she starts regarding her depression as a political issue.

December 1999. I remember that, amidst the Millennium Bug anxiety, I went to the birthday of Enrico, a kid who lived with his family in an old and isolated farmhouse.

The mysteriously familiar face of a deceased young woman shakes young surgeon Fabian out of his lethargy. On a whim, he leaves Berlin for Portugal, determined to win back his former girlfriend Doro, who works at an architectural company in Lisbon.

When Martin, a former GDR citizen, is released from jail, he lately becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.

Nina, a young actor, returns to the Ruhr region for her grandmother’s funeral. Tensions surface between her and her mother. The noises of a small town fill the eloquent silences in the complex mother-daughter relationships explored in this endearing film.

A handful of disparate people in Berlin are drawn to the same residential hotel in the drama Downhill City. Finnish musician Artsi heads to Berlin in hopes of hitting the big time; needing a place to stay, he takes a room at the Downhill City Hotel and ties to find a market for his music. Meanwhile, another Downhill Hotel resident, aspiring author Fabien, meets a former convict named Sascha who has nowhere to stay and offers to take him in. Peggy, who works at a fast-food restaurant, is unhappy with her boyfriend Hans and finally kicks him out. Peggy meets Artsi when he stops by the burger stand one day, while Hans (who ends up crashing with Sascha and Fabien) starts a new relationship of his own with Doris.

Clara is studying for a Ph.D in philosophy in Berlin. In this middle-class male academic environment, she feels pushed to one side. She returns to her childhood village in former East Germany for her mother's birthday, and becomes aware that a distance has grown between her and her family.

Henry is alone in a silent and darkened apartment, anxious and waiting by the phone, as his small child sleeps. Finally, a call. His wife Claire is on the other side of the world on a beach at a luxury resort, drunk, also in the dark, but apparently with another man. An adulterous affair, or a life in danger? In the harrowing wait and frantic calls that follow, is it his marriage, his wife or his sanity that is most under threat? The telephone line is the single fragile thread that connects them. All Henry can do is to hang onto that phone.

A young woman makes a living as a disc jockey in Berlin without having a permanent home or real friends. She accidentally discovers that her mother has died and sets out on a search for clues, which also leads her to her penniless father.

Elena is a student in Minsk. She is having an intense but self-destructive love affair with Viktor. When Elena's father goes to prison she has to take charge of his business dealings to help him. She drives repeatedly into the restricted zone at Chernobyl, behind the wheel of a truck, in order to smuggle contaminated steel. The conflicts with Viktor escalate, and Elena is increasingly captivated by the zone's deceptive beauty...

What stops two people from being together? A third one. What stops one person from fighting for another? Nothing. Pedro lives in the suburbs, where he works with his father in a garage. Everyday he takes the bus downtown where he goes to school and meets his friends. It's summertime and they all go down to the river where they spend their free time or even their school time. Among joints, motorbike riding and swimming, everything seems to go well with this group of friends, until the moment when Pedro and his best friend find out that both of them like the same girl. Pedro finds himself inside a downward spiral, where everything around him seems to fall apart. Like a magnet attracts the iron, Pedro seems to attract problems, from the school until his relationship with his parents. This is the story of Pedro, who by having his head being pushed down so much learned how to breathe under water.

When Marie’s boyfriend proposes to her in front of his entire family, she doesn't know what to say and flees to the countryside to think it over alone. But her thoughts accompany her. They sit around her in flesh and blood: Her mother pesters her with baby names, exboyfriends climb down trees and a woman in a sari narrates her life in poems. Her would-be fiancé eventually joins her, clashing his own luggage of thoughts with hers. But what if you show your thoughts to each other? How much honesty can a relationship take? In her first feature, director Zora Rux, an apprentice of Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, tells a surrealistic story of the search for one’s true self in poetic tableaus.