Ariane Riecker (Directing)

The False Promise of Advancement

Origin sticks like shit to your shoe! That's what Marlen Hobrack says, who grew up as a working-class child in Bautzen. But the promise of the old Federal Republic was that you can become anything if you just try hard enough. But that no longer applies. So is class in Germany fixed from birth? Have we long been living in a country in which origin and family background are more important for future prospects than individual performance and commitment? In Germany, it takes six generations to rise from poverty to the middle class, in Denmark only two generations. Those affected reflect on their life stories, the burden of their social origins, the wrong and right turning points for social advancement, as classified by social researchers. They talk of pride and shame, of financial hardship and wealth, of origin and future, of growing up and moving up in this Germany with its entrenched selection mechanisms for social advancement.

Release Date:2025-01-22

Department:Writing

Job:Writer

Chernobyl - Utopia in Flames

With our contemporary witnesses, we immerse ourselves in the Atomic Age of the Soviet Empire, which is initially shaped by a belief in technology and progress but is soon being pushed through with lies, secrecy and manipulation.

Release Date:2023-04-26

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Wem gehört der Osten - Die großen Deals der Einheit

Release Date:2017-01-16

Department:Writing

Job:Writer

Generation Wende

In 1987 the Central Institute for Youth Research in the GDR starts asking then 14-year-old pupils in great detail about their lives and their political attitudes. Two years later, everything changes. The land disappears and the young people grow up in a new state. The former director of studies Prof. Peter Forster manages to continue the study after the political upheaval until today. Thus, a remarkable collection of material has emerged, fully spent yet in the GDR over the last born, childhood, and adolescence. There are the personal biographies of the study participants who bear witness to the process of transformation from a socialist system of the GDR into the capitalist system of the Federal Republic.

Release Date:2013-04-15

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Hans Zimmer: The Sound of Hollywood

Documentary about Hans Zimmer.

Release Date:2011-03-14

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:1

Damals nach der DDR

Release Date:2010-09-13

Department:Creator

Job:Creator

My Father The Turk

The German filmmaker Marcus Attila Vetter has a Turkish father, Cahit Cubuk, and he goes to visit him for the first time in this documentary. He travels to the Anatolian village of Cubuk Koye, where his 72-year-old father lives with his wife and two daughters. A film crew that got there ahead of him interviews the hopeful father, who wonders what his son will be like. "If he's anything like me, he'll be warm-hearted. If he's more like his mother, the prospects are not very good." Marcus films the Turkish landscape and talks with his newly found family, who all cry many tears. Marcus's father feels that he had no choice back then but to leave Germany, and his halfsisters explain how much they missed their father when he was away. In the meantime, we hear passages read in voice-over from the diary of Marcus's mother Gerlinde, from the time that she was with Cahit - how they met, fell in love and ultimately broke up.

Release Date:2006-08-01

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Dennis Hopper: Create (or Die)

We are taken though the principal milestones of Hopper's biography, including his debut start in Hollywood, the meeting with James Dean and the influence he played upon him, his insubordination on sets and conflicts with the Hollywood directors which led to his black-listing, the years in New, the making of 'Easy Rider' (with an interesting connection of the ultimate road movie with the French new wave directors), 'Apocalypse Now', 'Blue Velvet', 'Colors', his fight with dependency on drugs and alcohol. We come to know Hopper as a complex artist, a valuable photographer who had always a camera on him and whose portraits or American life shots figure among the best in the genre, but also a rebel painter (who may still be rediscovered and become famous in posterity) and exquisite art collector.

Release Date:2003-02-10

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:2