Jeanine Meerapfel

An artistic audiovisual project emanating from the economic and social confusion that first emerged in recent years between Germany and Greece and now is spreading throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The two countries are presented here as examples, representative of the differences and conflicts that are exacerbated by a crisis.

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"A Woman" is a cinematic essay about identity. A search into the wounds of exile and a reflection on the function of memory. A haunting and intimate portrait of the director’s own mother. It is the story of an imitation artist, trying to adapt to the challenges of real life … as a woman.

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Artificial Intelligence is already changing almost every area of life today. This documentary essay is inspired by the changes that influence our perception of Topos. By combining film images, graphics with documentary text modules, the author associatively points out how the progress of data and technology colonizes human existence and fundamentally influences the balance between the psychological, mental, and biological aspects of life.

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It’s the late 1950s, and in an affluent and quietly respectable part of Buenos Aires, young Sulamit Löwenstein strikes up a friendship with her next-door neighbour Friedrich over the whereabouts of her family dog. She is the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to Argentina, he is the son of a senior SS officer, a tragic political legacy from whose shadow both characters struggle to escape over the next three decades. Following the teenaged Friedrich to Germany, Sulamit finds him caught up in the radical politics of late-1960s student life; and she’s forced to make important decisions about her attitude to her homeland when Friedrich returns to Argentina to join the fight against the military junta.

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General Mosconi is a small town in the North of Argentina, rich with oil and gas. 1993 the state owned enterprise, YPF, that gave work, health care and education to the whole region, was privatised. The unemployment rate climbed to 70 percent, the whole infrastructure system collapsed. The town is an example for what is today understood as the loss of state and politics.

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A widow reminisces on her life after returning to her family home in Greece.

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Drama about the life of a few working class Germans.

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A young father takes his son on a journey away from Buenos Aires and through the strange and wondrous world of rural South America. The man is unemployed and separated from the boy's mother. The trip teaches the man to rediscover both the world outside urban Argentina, and also to rediscover his son.

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Citizens of East Germany talk about their experiences and feelings in the face of upcoming elections that will lead to reunification with the West. The past is tinged with regret, frustration and anger, while the future is uncertain.

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Short film by Jeanine Meerapfel and Alcides Chiesa

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Since childhood, Raquel and Maria have been close friends. Now all grown-up, Raquel has fulfilled her dream of becoming an actress, while Maria has married a handyman, given birth to three children and runs the family household. In the wake of the Argentine military coup of 1976, Maria's oldest son Carlos is abducted. Desperate, Maria turns to her prominent friend for help. Yet the more Raquel gets involved in the search for Carlos, the more she becomes herself a target of the junta. Finally, she flees from Argentina to Berlin. Meanwhile Maria joins a group of women who investigate the fate of their disappeared relatives. In 1983, after the fall of the dictatorship, the two friends meet again.

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Between 1976 and 1982 thousands of citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in Argentina. How do Argentinians cope with this tragedy? How do they elaborate their recent past?

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They meet in Yugoslavia. Katharina, daughter of a Yugoslavian immigrant worker, has grown up in the Federal Republic of Germany. She is a confident, energetic career woman who has managed to work her way up to become a successful television journalist. She goes to visit her parent's country, to do a story about the children of immigrant workers in their home country. Although she says she doesn´t need a "home" any more, even she feels strange in her own country. Peter is a rather "untypical" sort of man: a dreamer, a thinker. He has given up his steady job as a composer for advertising films and is divorced. He goes to Jugoslavia to find something out about the past. He travels to the places where his father was stationed during the Second World War.

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In 1970, Melek Tez came to Berlin as a young worker from Turkey. A confident woman, she first countered racist resentments and remarks with irony and wit. Jokingly, she even referred to herself as a "Kümmeltürkin", a derogatory German term for Turkish migrants. Yet after fourteen humiliating years, her fighting spirit has given way to resignation: Melek Tez is returning to Turkey. Blending documentary, interviews and re-enacted scenes, director Jeanine Meerapfel chronicles Melek Tez' life experience.

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"Had it not been for Hitler, I would have been born a German-Jewish child, more German than Jewish, in a small village in the South of Germany. But as it happened, I was born in Argentina, my mothertongue is Spanish. I came to Germany 17 years ago." It is here, where author and director Jeanine Meerapfel starts searching for her own Jewish identity, being confronted time and time again with Federal Republic reality.

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Two life stories. That of Malou, a French woman, married to a German Jew, a refugee stranded in South America: a picture of the pre-war generation reflected in the unusual destiny of an individual woman. And that of Hannah, an alert, independent, modern woman, seeking after freedom and her own identity, and trying in present-day Berlin to save her shaky marriage.

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Marion is pregnant, but she doesn't know by whom. Three men come into question, all of whom will die sooner or later in the course of the movie. Just like all of us - as an announcement at the beginning of the film announces to the audience. The semi-documentary and fragmentarily narrated film leads via various paths and detours to the river that gives the film its title.

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The creation of news is illustrated by the example of the "Schwäbischen Donauzeitung". The selection of editors, the work on the typewriter and the printing process are shown.

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A woman tries to end the relationship with her boyfriend.

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From the 1950s onwards, Erika and Ulrich Gregor brought countless film historical milestones to Berlin and shaped cinema discourse in post-war Germany. A look at the life and work of the couple without whom Arsenal and the Forum wouldn’t exist.

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"A Woman" is a cinematic essay about identity. A search into the wounds of exile and a reflection on the function of memory. A haunting and intimate portrait of the director’s own mother. It is the story of an imitation artist, trying to adapt to the challenges of real life … as a woman.

Open details →

Artificial Intelligence is already changing almost every area of life today. This documentary essay is inspired by the changes that influence our perception of Topos. By combining film images, graphics with documentary text modules, the author associatively points out how the progress of data and technology colonizes human existence and fundamentally influences the balance between the psychological, mental, and biological aspects of life.

Open details →

Between 1976 and 1982 thousands of citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in Argentina. How do Argentinians cope with this tragedy? How do they elaborate their recent past?

Open details →

In 1970, Melek Tez came to Berlin as a young worker from Turkey. A confident woman, she first countered racist resentments and remarks with irony and wit. Jokingly, she even referred to herself as a "Kümmeltürkin", a derogatory German term for Turkish migrants. Yet after fourteen humiliating years, her fighting spirit has given way to resignation: Melek Tez is returning to Turkey. Blending documentary, interviews and re-enacted scenes, director Jeanine Meerapfel chronicles Melek Tez' life experience.

Open details →

An artistic audiovisual project emanating from the economic and social confusion that first emerged in recent years between Germany and Greece and now is spreading throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The two countries are presented here as examples, representative of the differences and conflicts that are exacerbated by a crisis.

Open details →

"A Woman" is a cinematic essay about identity. A search into the wounds of exile and a reflection on the function of memory. A haunting and intimate portrait of the director’s own mother. It is the story of an imitation artist, trying to adapt to the challenges of real life … as a woman.

Open details →

Artificial Intelligence is already changing almost every area of life today. This documentary essay is inspired by the changes that influence our perception of Topos. By combining film images, graphics with documentary text modules, the author associatively points out how the progress of data and technology colonizes human existence and fundamentally influences the balance between the psychological, mental, and biological aspects of life.

Open details →

It’s the late 1950s, and in an affluent and quietly respectable part of Buenos Aires, young Sulamit Löwenstein strikes up a friendship with her next-door neighbour Friedrich over the whereabouts of her family dog. She is the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to Argentina, he is the son of a senior SS officer, a tragic political legacy from whose shadow both characters struggle to escape over the next three decades. Following the teenaged Friedrich to Germany, Sulamit finds him caught up in the radical politics of late-1960s student life; and she’s forced to make important decisions about her attitude to her homeland when Friedrich returns to Argentina to join the fight against the military junta.

Open details →