DEFA-Studio für Dokumentarfilme

The film follows the creation, construction and design of the “Grand Hotel” on Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin: from the excavation pit to the shell of the building to its completion and the handing over of the keys.

Ribnitz-Damgarten, the jewel at the coast of the Baltic Sea, is located directly at the Saaler Bodden, between Stralsund and Rostock. The town and its surrounding area are made for vacationing. This documentary from 1989 also shows the other side, like, for example, how the increasing population density and the industrial production influence the ecological balance of the region. A community for the protection of the Bodden landscape is actively making an effort for conservation. At the institute for deep-sea fishery, research about the fish population is conducted, and agriculture as well is looking for solutions to preserve an intact environment.

A fairy-tale of the Sorbian poet Jurij Brezan as an allegory of threatened nature dedicated to the Sorbs.

Experiments and interviews are used in order to illustrate the special duties of care when raising children with regard to their behavior in road traffic.

An East German documentary by Andrew and Annelie Thorndike investigating NATO General Hans Speidel’s alleged role in the 1934 assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander I and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. Drawing on archival footage and documents, it scrutinizes Speidel’s past and postwar career, provoking controversy and a ban in West Germany. The film won First Prize at the 1958 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Heinrich Greif Prize in East Germany.

Around 1,500 people from more than forty countries met in Dresden for the 1984 congress of UNIMA, the Union Internationale de la Marionnette. Founded in 1929, UNIMA claims to be the oldest international theatre organisation and has been promoting the global development of puppet theatre to the present day. This Kinobox item offers affectionate impressions of the high art of puppetry.

The film uses documentary-style scenes, interviews and animated schematic drawings to expose the problems of the menopause as a natural stage of a woman's life, which is predominantly experienced without symptoms, and names individual problems about which Dr. van de Kamp, head of the outpatient clinic in Werder, is interviewed.

Berlin-Northeast. An area tries to meet new needs, to conform to human demands. The film registers the feelings of a girl from this area as she looks at photographs taken between 1903 and 1920 on behalf of the Berlin Local Health Insurance Fund.

How are problems solved in a socialist country? The film centres on an old gasworks in the middle of a workers' district in Berlin, capital of the GDR. For 100 years it was polluting the environment - now it is closed. What has happened to the former workers? Have they been made redundant? Will the site of the old works be taken over by a new one, or will a park be laid out there for the local inhabitants?

Documentary short about Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944).

The final exam of sixteen and seventeen year olds at the end of the 10th grade. The individual in the minutes in which he is supposed to show what he can do and who he is. A last class party before the community ends and one goes apart.

A life story from a bygone era. In a retirement home, the 90-year-old Hermann Reußner tells his story. He was born in 1891 in Dessau, back when a duke still reigned there. As a soldier under the German emperor, he participated in World War I. Reußner talks about his beginnings as a cook in the famous hotel Adlon at the Pariser Platz in Berlin. Later, he was head chef there for 30 years. This private life story gets impressively illustrated with photos and film footage.

A documentary about the village Kienitz at the river Oder, about the people, their life, their history.

“We no longer stand before a choice between peace and war, but between peace and annihilation (Brecht 1947)”, one of the posters in the Berlin Alexanderplatz underground station reads. In autumn 1981, the Berlin Art Academy had organised a poster competition on the subject of “Peace for the World”. The camera, and along with it the viewers, become waiters and observers.

A portrait of Helga Hörz, professor of ethics and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Angela Davis visiting the German Democratic Republic. A film about the people she met and her impressions.

From an official perspective, marginal youth culture did not exist in East Germany. The topic of subcultures was taboo in the GDR, and groups such as goths, skinheads, anti-skins, punks and neo-Nazis were dismissed as social deviations promoted by western countries. Director Roland Steiner had access to such young East Germans in the late 1980s. Over the course of four years, he brought them before the camera in an attempt to understand what drew them to these groups.

This documentary reports on the master potter Otto Engelmann from Klingmühl, who was commissioned to make black painted clay heads of Karl Marx in the spring of 1973. Engelmann briefly explains the individual work steps from mixing the casting slip to firing the clay heads and then painting them. An old craft is vividly captured on camera and accompanied by original sou

Dresden old and new, in between photo documents from 1945/46, the time of resurrection, enriched by very personal commentaries by woman director Annelie Thorndike. Music for solo trumpet, composed by Reiner Bredemeyer and played by Ludwig Guettler, is set to this film.