Merle Kröger

The sound of metal creaking as if something is about to break. An old pickup truck adapted to carry passengers crosses the La Guajira desert in Colombia. With the wind come voices that merge among the passengers who travel there. A Wayuu woman returns to her territory, accompanied by her family, after years of exile due to a paramilitary massacre. A cyclical journey where the time layers of the territory touch and the border between the living and the dead is diluted.

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Zohra has received a French residence permit for medical reasons, but when her health improves, she is supposed to leave the country. In the summer heat of her small town, dreams and everyday life merge into a shimmering narrative in the subjunctive.

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On September 14, 2012, a deflating lifeboat with thirteen people onboard was rescued in the Mediterranean. Working from a video filmed by a cruising tourist, the cineast Philip Scheffner offers a concentrated view of the situation in this region, echoing today's violences.

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The old paternal house of the Le family, set in a rural scenery at the fringes of the small town of Ninh Hoa, close to the southern coast of Vietnam: A household dominated by women, neither rich nor poor, with chicken behind the kitchen and rice paddies bordering the plot. Through the everyday life of the inhabitants of the house, the constellation of the extended family becomes visible. A constellation that is fundamentally marked by the course that history took in the second half of the 20th century, and that has made Germany a substantial reference point in the life of the Le family.

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(Self-)portrait of a Roma family living in Berlin, Germany.

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SCHICHT (SHIFT) is both a reckoning and a search for traces of the past. Layer by layer the film unfolds the portrait of the filmmaker's family - brought to life by records from private archives - and embarks on a dizzying trip through the shrinking industrial city of Salzgitter, Germany.

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On June 29, 1992, a farmer in East Germany found two dead bodies in a cornfield. They were Romanian citizens shot by hunters while trying to cross the external EU border. Were they really mistaken for wild boars? The trial began four years later and the accused were acquitted – but the relatives of the dead knew nothing. REVISION is the filmic reworking of a case that appeared to be long closed. The film not only attempts to document what really happened, it also poses the questions: why did two men die on a sunny day in the middle of a field? Who were they? What led them here? The search for answers drove the two filmmakers to sift through investigative files. This led them to new witnesses and to uncovering problems with European asylum policy. Above all, however, it led them to the relatives and their memories of the two dead men.

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I Am is a 2011 Indian anthology film by Onir. It consists of four short films: "Omar", "Afia", "Abhimanyu", and "Megha". Each film shares the common theme of fear and each is also based on real life stories. The film was financed by donations from more than 400 different people around the world, many of whom donated through social networking sites like Facebook. There are four stories but the characters are interwoven with each story. "Abhimanyu" is based on child abuse, "Omar" on gay rights, "Megha" is about Kashmiri Pandits and "Afia" deals with sperm donation. I Am was released with subtitles in all regions as six different languages are spoken in the film: Hindi, English, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Kashmiri.

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Two newspaper reports from the same day mark the beginning of the story: a sparrow is shot dead in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, while a German soldier is killed in an attack in Afghanistan. Scheffner sets out on a journey into a deceptive peace.

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