Archive & Distribution

In 1970, Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo managed to outsmart the directors of the British Museum and its security system to gain access to the museum’s secret underground vaults and film valuable African artifacts stowed away there. One day was enough to shoot this short film revealing the extent of the theft of African artifacts, stashed in plastic bags and wooden crates — and to make a case for their restitution.

Instead of telling the story of a shut down publishing house and its books, René Frölke's new film digs through its legacies. Each one becomes a fragment. The film drifts along these traces, in the wake of the music of its protagonist Tessa, in search of its own human history of knowledge and symbol production.

Is life about meeting or separating? Georgian director Lana Gogoberidze asks this question at the start of the film, as photos appear: almost like a miniature film, she is seen as a child being embraced by her mother Nutsa. In Gogoberidze’s family of intellectuals and artists, filmmaking follows a matrilinear logic across three generations.

In 2019, a curator drew our attention to the fact that we have what is probably the last copy of Prem Kapoor's debut BADNAM BASTI in our archive. The film is considered India's first queer film. The artfully crafted musical melodrama, an adaptation of Kamleshwar's 1957 novella of the same name, revolves around a love triangle.

The gentle portrait of cinephile Maria Stadler is the debut film by one of Germany’s most successful filmmakers, Doris Dörrie, together with Wolfgang Berndt. Despite falling audience figures and high debts, Maria Stadler (born 1914) devoted her life to running her cinema in a small Bavarian town.

Erwin Leiser was one of the first and most committed film directors to deal with the Nazi dictatorship and its crimes after the end of the Second World War. Now DEUTSCHLAND, ERWACHE! (FRG 1968), DIE FEUERPROBE - NOVEMBERPOGROM 1938 (FRG 1988) and OTTO JOHN - EINE DEUTSCHE GESCHICHTE (D 1995) have been digitally restored.

We are very happy to have the following films by indian master filmmaker Satyajit Ray now available as DCP with english subtitles: CHARULATA (The Lonely Wife), MAHANAGAR (The Big City), NAYAK (The Hero), KAPURUSH (The Coward), MAHAPURUSH (The Saint) und JAI BABA FELUNATH (The Elephant God). We do hold the screening rights for Germany, Austria and Swizerland.

In his latest documentary Daniel Kötter sketches the psychogeography of a geopolitically charged landscape and its inhabitants between extractivism, war and displacement. In the form of a journey in eastern Armenia, the film follows human and non-human actors as they make their way through the landscape, from Lake Sevan to the Sotk gold mine, occupied by Azerbaijan since the Karabakh War in 2020.

The digital restoration of Techqua Ikachi, Land - My Life by Anka Schmid, Agnes Barmettler and James Danaqyumptewa celebrated its premiere at Berlinale Forum Special. The unique ethnographic document, a collage of film, photography and painting, tells the story of the Hopi in Arizona from their own perspective and way of thinking.