Benny Drechsel

Ilyas and Yasemin are a couple in love - until Yasemin is shot by an unknown assailant in their shared café. Ilyas' life, as well as that of their daughter Senna, completely falls apart. And as the police begin to link him and his deceased wife to the crime, Ilyas finds himself utterly bewildered. The longer the suspicions persist, the more he wonders: Was Yasemin truly the woman he loved?

In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Nevertheless, over the decades, he continues his quest for freedom and love, even if he finds it in the most unusual places.

A Warsaw-based Vietnamese cook struggles to fit into the European culture, which his ten-year-old daughter has already embraced as her own. A story about love, misunderstanding and food.

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...

Aaron invites his girlfriend Lea and her 8-year-old son Tristan on a trip to the mountains. What could be a starting point of a new life together, slowly turns into difficult territory as the three fight for their positions within the new family.

Losing his memory after a mugging, a man known only as 'MP' (Missing Person) leaves his home and sets out on a journey - in search not only for his memory but perhaps also for a new identity. MP finds himself confronted by a world in which there are no longer any certainties; an era of crisis on many levels. On his travels from country to country, portrayed via an associative image montage and through a series of strange, illuminating, sometimes comic encounters, MP attempts to gain insight into the complexity of life in the 21st-century West - into what commentators have called an age of 'rolling catastrophe'.

A man drives through a deserted landscape. Suddenly his car hits a person, seriously hurting or even killing him. The driver searches for the body, cannot find it - and must accept, that there is no one. Instead, he does find blood on the broken windshield. What happens when realizing that we kill - without being confronted with the dead?

A small one-street village in the open landscape of East Germany, marked by the political changes of the past decade and long forgotten by the rest of society. FAR END OF THE MILKY WAY is a trip to the periphery of society. Wealth and jobs are scarce around here, but people want to stay regardless. With stubbornness and a sense of humor, they make the best of their situation. FAR END OF THE MILKY WAY is a film about work and love, your garden as your pub, ashes in the snow and slaughtering pigs

After being abandoned by their Nazi parents at the end of World War II, five German siblings embark on a harrowing journey across their war-torn country. Led by the eldest, 14 year-old Lore, the children are forced to confront their parents’ actions and the reality of a new world.

A young German travels in Botswana. On the banks of a river, he meets an old fisherman who takes him deep into the wilderness in his wooden boat. The next morning, he finds himself alone in a seemingly endless river delta. After days of wandering, he arrives in a village far from civilisation, but his odyssey never ends. More and more, he loses control in the impassability of a foreign culture.

Rolf Eden is Germany’s last playboy. As ‘king of disco’ he launched the first beauty contests popularising DJing and striptease in prudish West Germany. Father of seven children of seven different women, he has danced with the Rolling Stones and Ella Fitzgerald in his clubs. Rolf Eden is a larger than life octogenarian with long, blond hair… his girlfriend is younger than his grandchild. This unflinching conviction was essential for Eden when he, coming from a Jewish background, entered the German entertainment business of the 1950s. Leaving Israel via Paris, he returned to post war Germany to open a nightclub on West Berlin famous Boulevard Kudamm, decidedly blocking out the country’s recent dark history.

Tamar, an attractive single mother, lives alone in a small village with her two daughters. Unsatisfied, she attempts to fill her many voids through meaningless sexual rendezvous.

Norbert Witte, once the king of the only amusement park of the former GDR, today he is behind bars in Germany. When fleeing bankruptcy in Berlin, Norbert Witte and his family secretly shipped their rollercoasters to Peru. Things went wrong here too. In a desperate attempt, Norbert tried to smuggle cocaine to Germany. Three years later his 23 years old son Marcel was sentenced to 20 years in a Peruvian prison. Now the father is doing everything he can in order to free his son.

The daily hardships of a war-scarred Bosnian village, where all that remains are widows and orphans, are painstakingly documented in this first feature from director Aida Begic. Snow offers insight about the psychological aftereffects of the 1992-95 civil war from a distinctively female point of view without showing any of the brutality or carnage.

Before leaving Russia and moving to Western Europe, famous opera singer Lyuba travels to her hometown to say goodbye and show her teenage son around. But Andrey, Lyuba’s son, disappears and she must stay in the place she hates the most to search for him. A piercing exploration of identity and transformation, against the backdrop of a Russian hinterland, surrounded by Orthodox churches and snow.

In the last winter of WWII a group of captive German soldiers is brought to a remote Russian village, where widows, a child and a crippled are the only ones left. This is a military drama about those, who can love and forgive.