if... Productions

Life is good for Derya and Aziz, a celebrated artist couple from Turkey, until an incident at their play’s premiere. Suddenly targeted by the state and struggling to balance their ideals with life’s necessities, their marriage is pushed to a breaking point.

Franz is by far the smallest in the class, has blond ringlets and gets a high-pitched squeaky voice when he gets upset. Luckily, two best friends help: Gabi and Eberhard. When Franz discovers Hank Haberer's "10 rules for a real man" for himself one day, turbulence is inevitable and the friendship of the three gets into trouble.

As a contestant in a singing casting show, Lea is asked by the TV team who she is and what makes her special. She doesn't know and begins to slip into different roles in her search for what makes her special, developing an unexpected fascination for her aunt Kati. Kati's return home as head architect for the renovation of the Residenzschloss after many years abroad reunites the family in one place. This reunion raises the hopes of grandparents Friedrich and Christel that they can join forces to give their pension, which has few visitors, a new lease of life.

When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her.

As a forestry student doing an internship, Anja Grimm ends up in that remote area in the Upper Palatinate Forest, where she went on vacation with her parents as an eight-year-old girl and her father disappeared without a trace. Her job is to take soil samples to create a soil map. At one point in the forest floor she comes across abnormal irregularities. Not long after their arrival, a brutal murder occurs. Anja soon arouses suspicion and hostility not only among the villagers with her suspicion that the perpetrator knows something about her father's fate and with her questions about the atypical soil composition in the forest clearing. Even the police react extremely reservedly to their investigations. And when it turns out that the young woman can read the signs of the forest like an open book, forces mobilize in the village who are apparently ready for anything because there is a dark secret that needs to be kept.

Not an easy decision! District Administrator Hans Schuierer from the Upper Palatinate first opposed his own political line in 1981 and finally against the entire Bavarian Free State and Prime Minister Strauss. Because the planned reprocessing plant Wackersdorf promised 3,000 new jobs for the structurally weak region - but what if these are associated with massive health and ecological damage for future generations? Isn't it then the duty of a politician and citizen to resist?

Out of her love for the great thinker Leibniz, Queen Charlotte commissions a portrait of him. During the portrait sessions, the philosopher and the young painter engage in a passionate struggle for truth in image and likeness, and ultimately for love and death.

Director Jörg Adolph accompanies ornithologist Dr. Norbert Schäffer, chairman of the Bavarian Society for the Protection of Birds (LBV), on his mission to save bird life. We embark on an emotional and diverse journey of discovery into the fascinating world of birds and experience species and nature conservation in action.

Director Miriam Pucitta grew up as the child of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s. She herself has only fragmentary memories of this time; her mother and other relatives evade Miriam's questions. Together with her daughter Giulia, she researches her family's living conditions in Switzerland and finds a new understanding of her parents' difficult decisions.

East Germany, in autumn 1999. Gudrun Pfaff is about to turn sixty when she finds out that the orphanage she grew up in is being sold to turn into a hotel, and she is willing to do anything to stop it.

While Kurdish gigolo Baran dreams of a future in Europe, German pilot Marion is struggling to come to terms with her cancer diagnosis. When the two meet at the Turkish holiday resort of Marmaris, they engage in a kind of double-cross and decide to enter into a sham marriage. After a promising beginning, a shared future seems well within their reach. But things turn out not to be quite as simple as that.

We all know the big bad wolf of fairy-tale fame—over hundreds of years the wolf has become a culturally imprinted symbol of fear that’s completely detached from reality. In fact there weren’t even any wolves in western Europe for a long time. But they’re back—for example in Germany, where these social animals now occupy a few scattered areas around the country that people have left to them.

The story of a dental assistant in the Upper Palatinate in the 1980s. The dental practice where she works is haunted. This transforms the young woman from a wallflower into a celebrity known far beyond the region.

In 1968, the young Edgar Reitz teaches filmmaking at a girls’ school – a ground-breaking educational experiment. Fifty-five years later, there is a class reunion.

In a small town in eastern Germany in the 1990s, two teenage friends with Vietnamese and Mongolian roots try to find their place in an environment marked by prejudice. But when one of them falls in love with a young neo-Nazi, their friendship is put in jeopardy.