Spiritual Letters

100 Years of the UFA

August 2017 •German

The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.

Bomb It

April 2007 •English

Through interviews and guerilla footage of graffiti writers in action on five continents, the documentary tells the story of graffiti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings thru its notorious explosion in New York City during the 70’s and 80’s, then follows the flames as they paint the globe.

Berlin Utopiekadaver

April 2024 •German

A taxi drives through the city of Berlin. Its driver is a punk, left and a well-known figure in the autonomous scene. The stations of his trip are the most important places of the autonomous scene: all in the struggle for survival. The last evictions have not yet been processed and the next ones are coming right up.

The Pitch

October 2017 •English

"The Pitch" takes a look at the world of international street performing buskers to find out why these men and women have chosen to "pass the hat" to make a living, along with the challenges they face.

Ich will da sein - Jenny Gröllmann

June 2008 •German

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

David Choe: High Risk

July 2015 •English

Artist David Choe has led a life of high risk, from hedonistic excesses to being imprisoned at a maximum security facility in a foreign country, and yet has been dramatically rewarded for his exploits. Life didn't change much when he traded a $60k fee in favor of stock in a start-up called The Facebook, but now he is estimated to be worth over $250 million, highlighting a colorful career filled with giant street art installations, porn star affairs and investigative reporting for companies like Vice and CNN. Director and childhood friend Harry Kim guides us through the fantastically surreal life of Choe featuring interviews and appearances by Kevin Smith, Eli Roth, Sasha Grey, Sean Parker, and Shepard Fairey.

The Writing on the Wall

December 1986 •English

"In this half-hour documentary, Producer Sandra King provides an intimate portrait of a public phenomenon: Graffiti. Over an 18 month period, King and her crew followed the teenage members of a graffiti 'crew,' Vandals on the Street, as they painted and rapped and moved through the streets of downtown Newark. What emerges is a unique glimpse behind the 'tags' at the kind of inner city kids who write on walls, but who also make art; who create out of wedlock children, but who also form binding relationships; who drop out of school and never read a book, but who create their own brand of poetry through the medium of 'rap.'

Tangerine Dream - Signals from the Schwäbischen Strasse

May 1976 •German

German TV film, also shown on Spanish TV in 1976, this is a film all about TD which includes informal interviews and concert/studio footage, most of which seems to have been done exclusively for the film. The interviews are in the German language. The street name in the title refers to where Edgar Froese used to live in Berlin (apparently Klaus Schulze lived on the same street at the time) and is now the site of the TDI offices.

Berliner Pflaster

January 1956 •German

Commissioned by the Berliner Landesbildarchiv, this movie shows countless impressions of (West) Berlin everyday life, accentuated with self-ironic commentary.

Becoming Black

October 2019 •German

In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin color is merely a coincidence. As a teenager, she accidentally discovers the truth. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Sigrid, an East German woman, fell in love with Lucien from Togo and became pregnant. But she was already married to Armin. The child is Togolese-East German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. In interviews with Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents, striving for normality, developed following her birth. What sounds like fieldwork about social dislocation becomes an autobiographical essay film and a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, viewed from a very personal perspective.

Olympia 1936. Der verratene Traum

August 2016 •German

The film chronicles the story of how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual benefit, a small sports event into the modern Olympics. The grand themes and controversial issues from the 1936 Games have continued to this day: Monumentality, budget overruns, collusion with authoritarian regimes, corruption and sometimes even bribery.

I Don’t Want to Be Just a Memory

February 2024 •English

Berlin queer community members mourn the substance abuse-related loss of their friends by sharing memories and rituals. Resembling glow-in-the-dark fungi, they radiate light together as a network of support and care.

JDL - Behind The Wall

January 2024 •Dutch

Director Deborah Faraone Mennella followed street artist Judith de Leeuw (JDL) for one year, during her life in the Netherlands and during the creation process 'Love is Stronger Than Death' in the Italian city of Taranto. You can see in a spectacular way how the 30-meter mural was created. common social issues are leading in JDL's designs. This time, however, it is the death of her father that plays a central role.

Tunnel to Freedom

July 2021 •German

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

Ein Tag in Berlin

January 1965 •German

La Doctrine

January 2021 •French

Narrator dreams of Madrid while being caught in a repetitive loop somewhere in Paris. He questions if his interlocutor is a real human being, as their dialogue, mostly built of citations, doesn't seem to be helping with breaking the loop.

Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony

February 2008 •German

Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.

KitKatClub - Das Leben ist ein Zirkus

Invalid date •German

The story of the legendary Berlin club and its founder, a woman whose life is inextricably interwoven with the bright and dark sides of a hedonistic lifestyle.

Who Killed Michael Stewart?

January 1986 •English

A documentary about a case of police brutality in the 80's NYC, the killing of graffiti artist Michael Stewart

White Walls Say Nothing

May 2017 •Spanish

Buenos Aires is a complex, chaotic city. It has European style and a Latin American heart. It has oscillated between dictatorship and democracy for over a century, and its citizens have faced brutal oppression and economic disaster. Throughout all this, successive generations of activists and artists have taken to the streets of this city to express themselves through art. This has given the walls a powerful and symbolic role: they have become the city’s voice. This tradition of expression in public space, of art and activism interweaving, has made the streets of Buenos Aires into a riot of colour and communication, giving the world a lesson in how to make resistance beautiful.