Good Game

Filmmaker Nadia el Fani explores secularism in the predominantly Muslim country of Tunisia before and after the fall of Ben Ali.

"I was born stoned". The words come from MonaLisa, who's struggling to put the heroin on the shelf. Documentary filmmaker Jessica Nettelbladt has followed the long-suffering, but far from broken, MonaLisa for eight years. The result is as honest as the raw film about a woman's struggle with herself and the world.

This is a documentary film chronicling the brutal Honour Killing of Banaz Mahmod, a young British Kurdish woman in London, killed by her own family for choosing a life for herself.

Griffith once noticed: "What the modern movie lacks is the beauty of moving wind in the trees." As third part of the series of filmworks Monument to Another Man’s Fatherland, View from the Acropolis explores the site where the Pergamon Altar was taken from in the late 19th century. Today a Berlin highlight, the altar was originally built around 200 BC in Anatolia (present day Turkey). In the landscape, different cultures, present and past are interwoven, connected by their presence, the wind and the changing light.

This documentary follows two Mohawk girls on their journey to become Mohawk women. Friends since childhood, Kaienkwinehtha and Kasennakohe are members of the traditional community of Akwesasne on the U.S./Canada border. Together, they undertake a four-year rite of passage for adolescents, called Oheró:kon, or "under the husk." The ceremony had been nearly extinct, a casualty of colonialism and intergenerational trauma; revived in the past decade by two traditional leaders, it has since flourished. Filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox has served as a mentor, or "auntie," to many youth going through the passage rites.

Lenka and Míra Hřib are a young married couple with two small children. They are both interested in ecology and sustainable life.

An observational documentary about Jakub Špalek and all his activities, victories and losses in the years 1989 to 1999.

A documentary film following several years in the life of Jan Potměšil who has become a very popular actor at an early age, representing the type of a young sporty intellectual. After a serious car crash in 1989, he ended up on a wheelchair. He was 23 years old at the time. After a year of rehabilitation, he returned to the stage. Excelling in “Flowers for Algernon”, he continuously acts in the production in front of sell-out crowds across the country. He also lives his personal life, experiencing new loves and breakups, is engaged in civic affairs and returns to the hospital now and then. The film aims to give a non-pathetic image of a life lived to the full despite adversity.

Heda Blochová was born in Prague into the Jewish family of the cofounder of the well-known Koh-i-noor factory. She married Rudolf Margolius, a lawyer. Soon after the wedding the young couple and the whole Margolius family were deported to the ghetto in Lodz. After spending a couple of years there, they were all taken to Oswiecim concentration camp. There the family was parted. Heda was lucky enough to be taken to a labour camp after a few months and was finally made to join the Death March. She managed to escape the guards and thus saved her life.

Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their stories. She studied her own people, an unusual practice at the time, and during her lifetime became known as the foremost authority on Black folklore.

Hasan Hourani, a Palestinian poet and illustrator, died aged 29 in Jaffa while trying to rescue his nephew from the sea. Shortly after, the filmmaker Mais Darwazah discovers his drawings and poems and feels drawn to Hourani's world— a universe outside space and time; a place of wonder, discovery, and freedom. Motivated by this kinship, Darwazah embarks on a journey to her homeland, Palestine: a place she has never known.