At the beginning there is the Breaking Up with silence. A yound girl is writing in three cycles of autum about that what happened: In a stoic Household she spends her childhood. After the loss of her beloved mother Hanna has to endure the inexorability of growing up. As she is to suffocate on her silence, she lets the whispering voices out. If there was an epigraph for the film, it would be: „I was born grown up and slowly grew down.“

The great promise of internet-based forms of communication is that they help maintain relationships over great geographical distance. Their proliferation and success has, in only a couple of years, fostered new forms of living together, new modes of closeness and intimacy. The collaborative documentary project “Intimate Distance” is a unique experiment for which three transnational families (dispersed between Germany and Russia, Turkey, and Colombia) have recorded their webcam conversations over the course of several months. The resulting film offers a very intimate insight into the fascinating communication rituals, with which people who are separated by migration organize a transnational family life via Skype. “Intimate Distance” is a documentary that evolved without the presence of a director. It is composed solely from the images that its protagonists produce of themselves on a daily basis with the help of digital technology. Thus, the film is a meditation on the potentials and limitations of digitally mediated proximity.

After escaping from psychiatry, young Karla is drifting through nocturnal Berlin. She meets old friends and new acquaintants, crosses bridges and climbes on roofs. An inner and outer journey with unknown destination.

How long do we wait to open our hearts? When is it safe to do so? How long does forgiveness take? Is it the right path? Is forgiveness even possible? I was born and raised in Israel to a family with Eastern European roots, I visited Auschwitz as a teenager, served in the Israeli army for three years, and since childhood I have been fascinated with my people’s tortured past and its implications today. I got the idea for this story from my mother, based on an experience we had in Germany when I was a four years old. Since then, and up until I shot the film, my mother has refused to return to Berlin. The reactions of the women in the film, like my mother and many others, are not based on their own memories from the Second World War. Rather, they are inherited collective memories. Arrival deals with two fundamental elements of cinema, and history: Time and space, and the dynamic relationship between them. While I developed the story for this film in Berlin, last year, I was living in the same space: I walked the same streets, I heard the same language, I saw the same buildings, but I was free. On the train, the boy forces an encounter; the same way I did as a child, same as I am doing today with Arrival. I have been told to hold on to the past because it should never happen again… but that doesn’t mean we can’t change. As the generation that shapes the future, it is my responsibility and my true hope that we can remember; yet heal, grow and reconcile.

“A wounded healer inhales her fractures, tirelessly. With grace & defiance. She breathes in the whole world”. (Premise taken from the film, written by the author) The film grants us to be witnesses of becoming, of pain, of sorrow and the child-like curiosity that comes with it. A cinematic rhyme of disobedience & decay.

Eine Stadt. Eine Frage. Keine Antwort. Etwas Selbstreflexion kann eben nie schaden.

When you are 20 and finished school you can do whatever you dreamed of. The world is your oyster. But what happens if you decide not to leave your room. A film is hiding its protagonist in order to show him as good as possible.

A silent and introverted 12 year old girl lives in a dysfunctional family on the outskirts of a village. Her father is physically violent and her mother is seriously ill, and, like the girl herself: she is defenseless. At home, the girl carries out the roles of both nurse and housekeeper. On the day, on which we tell her story, the girl decides to break through the circle of fear, violence and oppression of her daily life. Secretly, she makes the serious decision to step through the gate of her parents' land, into life and into her own personal responsibility. The film is about unquenchable thirst for life, which, despite all duties and burdens that we loyally carry with us, swells up inside us and makes us act. On another level, the film examines the price that the girl has to pay to throw off these chains of slavery; to free herself from oppressive duties.