Jeanine Meerapfel

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.

"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.

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.

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?

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.

"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.