Peter Nestler

The film presents artists from the Sinti and Roma minority who shape the trauma of persecution and very personal experiences in their works.

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For more than eight decades, German Sinti and Roma experienced injustice. The film tells of the family of activist Romani Rose, their resistance and insistence on justice. The painful story of a minority between trauma and self-assertion. The two-part film deals with various forms of resistance by German and Austrian Sinti and Roma over eight decades. It is about rebellion against injustice and the insistence on dignity and justice.

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In 1950, Picasso was offered a room that had once been used as a chapel in his hometown of Vallauris. He pictured turning it into a “pagan site for a unique cult” that would “unite all the people and be dedicated to peace.”

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“Don’t be scared,” he’d whisper, “There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just the hollow people.” Peter Nestler has made a film based on Israeli author and scriptwriter Etgar Keret’s short story “The Hollow Men”. a man’s memories of his childhood, marked by the fear of bodiless voices and masks. A beautiful and terrible miniature at the same time.

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Ethnologist and adventurer, Count Eric von Rosen was a man of contradictions: interested in the natives of Africa and colonial racism. Nestler embarks on a journey in search of his grandfather.

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A hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), and to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

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Peter Nestler portrays the everyday life of two young music students from Budapest who are trying to balance their family life, which is shaped by Roma traditions, with their academic education at music school. Brigitta, 12, and Tünde Máko, 10, live with their parents and two older sisters in Budapest's 6th district, the city's former Jewish quarter. Music is very important in this family, and both girls have been playing the violin since the age of five, just like their father and grandfather. Their grandfather discovered the girls' talent, and since then Brigitta and Tünde Máko have been attending a music school where they also receive private lessons.

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The revolt at Sobibór extermination camp in October 1943 is a central episode of resistance against national socialism. Thomas «Toivi» Blatt, son of a Jewish businessman, was 15 when he was deported to Sobibór. Blatt was among those who managed to escape during the uprising only to find his newly found freedom deceptive when old friends and neighbours refused to help. Director Peter Nestler accompanied Toivi Blatt on his trips through Poland.

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Jewish painter Leopold Mayer fled his native Frankfurt at the rise of the Nazi regime. Although briefly finding refuge in France, where he changed his name to Leo Maillet, his stay was cut short by Germany's invasion of Paris. Flucht traces Maillet's escape from the Gestapo and the French police, using Maillet's "Entre chien et loup" series of paintings as the framework for the film. Accompanied by Maillet's son Daniel, Peter Nestler revisits the late artist's hiding places and depicts a hauntingly beautiful portrait of an outstanding artist on the run.

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Today, the Römerstrasse in Italy's Aosta valley, is a significant traffic artery in the center of modern Europe. Nestler's journey explores the moving history of the Aosta valley, which passed through many hands - from the Roman Empire to Burgundian and Frankish kingdoms - until it was acquired by Italy in the 11th century. The now busy motorway, which runs from the Po Valley to the Great and Little St. Bernhard passes, is revealed through the timeless eyes of a historian. At the same time, the documentary sheds light on cultural traditions and contemporary life in the region.

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This film is about the indigenous cultures of Ecuador, of what is past and what is preserved, of destruction and resistance, of persisting in new ways, of music in the villages high up in the Andes, of music in the cities and in a tropical climate among descendants of African slaves. The film is about Earth, about working with Earth, sacred to the indigenous people. An account of beauty that silences, of friendliness, also grief.

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Peter Nestler illustrates a poem by Hans Sachs from 1540.

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The story begins on a hilltop, at an old castle that served as a German observation post in 1942. The traces of German fascism have also left their mark on this landscape.

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A film of Hungarian folk artists, sharing their handicrafts and paintings with the filmmakers.

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A documentary about the Sami people across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and about the environmental devastation in that area throughout the 20th century.

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Nestler traces the history of Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto from the middle ages to the present day.

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A tribute to the victims of a mining disaster that happened in 1930 in Silesia before the reign of Nazi Germany.

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Humanity’s thirst for knowledge and its consequences, from the Bible to the A-bomb. Nestler uses sixteenth-century engravings and paintings by artists such as Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein the Younger, Hans Weiditz, Sebald Beham and Hans Baldung.

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Still photography combined with moving imagery in this portrait of civic life in Chile. Made for Swedish public television almost a decade after the 1973 coup d'etat.

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Peter Nestler, an important German filmmaker with an extensive filmography, agrees with Chilean filmmaker Rodrigo Gonçalves, exiled in Sweden, to make a documentary on PIDEE (Protection of Children Harmed by the State of Emergency) and on FASIC, a Catholic organisation for the defence of human rights. It is one of the first clandestine films to be made during the period of the dictatorship, and provides an insight into the state of repression in which the population was living. The filmmakers entered the country in 1982 and clandestinely shot several films in the country. Among the testimonies is an interview with the widow of Hugo Araya, "El Salvaje", filmmaker and photographer assassinated on 11 September 1973. The film's credits list "Sergio Bustamante" as co-director, a fictitious name invented by Gonçalves because he was still in exile. "How oppression strikes " won the FIPRECI prize at the Oberhausen Festival, Germany, in 1983.

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The film documents the activities of two human-rights organisations during the military dictatorship in Chile — PIDEE (Protección de la Infancia Dañada por el Estado de Emergencia) and FASIC (Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas).

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Rarely screened two part documentary on the Swedish-Chilean folk music group Victor Jaras barn [Victor Jara's Children], formed by folk musician and researcher Mariella Ferreira. One of several films by Peter and Zsóka Nestler in the 1970's and 1980's on the political situation in Latin America, produced for Swedish public television.

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Rarely screened documentary on West-German anti-communism and the Deutsches Friedenunion [The German Peace Union]. Made in collaboration with Kristian Romare and produced by SVT (Swedish Public Television).

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This work produced by Swedish television, where Swedish kids reads texts written by Japanese kids about their experiencing of and surviving the bombings. In the film we see images/drawings painted by these children. Nestlers inspiration comes from the book Children of the A Bomb "Five years after the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, a Professor of Education at Hiroshima University organized a project to preserve for the record the stories of those who had been on the receiving side of that catastrophic explosion. (Martin Grennberger)

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Peter Nestler's short focusses the works of four Chilean artists: two painters [Nicolas de la Cruz and Jorge Kuhn], a graphic designer [Rolando Pérez], and a guitar player [Adrián Miranda]. Together they show, without words, how they see their beautiful country after the coup d'etat - suddenly the colorful pastoral scenes change to the sharp contrasts of black-and-white woodcuts presenting the distorted faces of the military dictators - and what they hope for the future.

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Documentary short made for Swedish public television (SVT) about the past and current situation for Native Americans in the US. The film was produced as an introduction to the American documentary Navajo Girl (Robert Young, 1973). Något om USA:s indianer [Something about the Indians in the USA] is another example of Nestler's method of combining still photos, drawings and moving images from different sources.

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Documentary short about Iranian migration in Sweden.

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Second documentary short by Peter Nestler about Iranian migration in Sweden.

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A Roma silversmith talks about her experiences.

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Nestler relates the histories of shipbuilding, armaments, and war in Europe to the exploitation of labor and the circulation of knowledge and capital between countries.

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In the 1970's Peter and Zsóka Nestler made several educational documentaries on industrial production for Swedish public television. The three-part Berghantering/Järnhantering [Mining/Ironworks] (1974-1975) explores the historical roots and contemporary material conditions of mining and iron production in Sweden and elsewhere.

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A contribution from the documentary film cycle about the invention and development of certain work techniques, production processes and materials.

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Stoff (1) is part of a series of films made for television and aimed at young audiences. The series was dedicated to the history and techniques behind the production of objects, materials (paper, letterpress, fabrics, etc.), highlighting the differences between artisanal and industrial production and the labour and economic relations involved in each of these methods of making things.

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A reflection on the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet captured in its economic and social causalities. Originally shot for a TV youth program but canceled before broadcast.

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Nestler highlights visits by several German entrepreneurs to oil facilities. In the 1970s, Peter and his wife, Zsóka Nestler, collaborated on a series of educational films for television that focused on craft-making. These “biographies of objects” are rigorous investigations into the history of working techniques, production processes, and materials.

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With the help of drawings, Nestler provides a historical overview of the types of work associated with industries that are crucial to Scandinavia, particularly those related to ore mining.

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The film is based on the eponymous 1960 novel by author Peter Weiss. In this autobiographical text, the author describes the years of his childhood and youth in Germany in the 20s and 30s as well as the flight of his half-Jewish family from persecution by the Nazis. This odyssey also portrays the young first-person narrator’s struggle for his artistic existence, as he was striving to establish himself as a painter and writer. In a free, sensual essay between fiction and document, realistic description and stylised invention, the film attempts to kindle today’s flame based on the past’s, and to create a new and vibrant third work from it. (Locarno Festival)

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Ethnologist and adventurer, Count Eric von Rosen was a man of contradictions: interested in the natives of Africa and colonial racism. Nestler embarks on a journey in search of his grandfather.

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A hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), and to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

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Interview with Peter Nestler about his filmmaking practice conducted and directed by Christoph Hübner

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Documentary that portrays Vincent van Gogh's live and work through his letters to his brother Theo.

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The film develops 5 questions about documentary film against the background of the media-political situation of the early 1970s in West Germany. The following topics are developed: (1) the personal approach of filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn to his profession; (2) the technical and technical approach of cameraman Rudolf Körösi; (3) the development of documentary film based on John Grierson's British School of Documentary Film; (4) the working conditions and political framework for the production of documentary films at WDR and NDR; (5) the constitutive characteristics of socially relevant documentary film.

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The film presents artists from the Sinti and Roma minority who shape the trauma of persecution and very personal experiences in their works.

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For more than eight decades, German Sinti and Roma experienced injustice. The film tells of the family of activist Romani Rose, their resistance and insistence on justice. The painful story of a minority between trauma and self-assertion. The two-part film deals with various forms of resistance by German and Austrian Sinti and Roma over eight decades. It is about rebellion against injustice and the insistence on dignity and justice.

Open details →

Ethnologist and adventurer, Count Eric von Rosen was a man of contradictions: interested in the natives of Africa and colonial racism. Nestler embarks on a journey in search of his grandfather.

Open details →

A hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), and to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

Open details →

Peter Nestler portrays the everyday life of two young music students from Budapest who are trying to balance their family life, which is shaped by Roma traditions, with their academic education at music school. Brigitta, 12, and Tünde Máko, 10, live with their parents and two older sisters in Budapest's 6th district, the city's former Jewish quarter. Music is very important in this family, and both girls have been playing the violin since the age of five, just like their father and grandfather. Their grandfather discovered the girls' talent, and since then Brigitta and Tünde Máko have been attending a music school where they also receive private lessons.

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