Luisa-Céline Gaffron

The Shadow

"Der Schatten" shows a journalist who receives an prophecy message: Norah (Deleila Piasko) wants to risk a new beginning in the Austrian metropolis. As soon as she arrives in town, she meets a beggar woman who predicts that in six weeks she will kill a man named Arthur Grimm. At first, Norah doesn't pay any attention to the incident since the name doesn't mean anything to her, but then strange things start to happen.

Ladybitch

Ela, a young actress, gets a role with the well-known theatre director Franz Kramer. The production is a great opportunity for Ela, but also comes with pressure. Kramer constantly oversteps Elas boundaries, and the situation worsens when Kramer sexually harasses her. Ela struggles to reconstruct her role as a self-confident character-and realizes that to do so, she has to take the same steps of self-empowerment in her real life.

German Cocaine Cowboy

Persian Lessons

Occupied France, 1942. Gilles is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany. He narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but Gilles gets assigned a life-or-death mission: to teach Farsi to Head of Camp Koch, who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. Through an ingenious trick, Gilles manages to survive by inventing words of "Farsi" every day and teaching them to Koch.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

In 1933 in Berlin. Anna is only nine years old when her life changes from the ground up. To escape the Nazis, her father Arthur Kemper, a well-known Jewish journalist, has to flee to Zurich. His family, Anna, her twelve-year-old brother Max and her mother Dorothea, follow him shortly thereafter. Anna has to leave everything behind, including her beloved pink rabbit, and to face a new life full of challenges and privations abroad.

Chess Story

1938. While the Nazi troops march into Vienna, the lawyer Josef Bartok hastily tries to escape to the USA with his wife but is arrested by the Gestapo. Bartok remains steadfast and refuses to cooperate with the Gestapo that requires confidential information from him. Thrown into solitary confinement, Bartok is psychologically tormented for months and begins to weaken. However, when he steals an old book about chess it sets him on course to overcome the mental suffering inflicted upon him, until it becomes a dangerous obsession.

Irish Crime: Family Ties

Abbie Campbell is in prison for murder, she stabbed her sleeping husband. The background to the brutal act was never clarified, Abbie had refused any statement at the time. Criminal psychologist Cathrin Blake has to prepare an expert opinion on the young woman.

Next Door

Berlin, the Prenzlauer Berg district. Daniel is a movie star accustomed to success. His loft apartment is stylish and so is his wife, and the nanny has the children under control. Everything is tip-top, bilingual and ready for him to jet off to an audition in London where a role in an American superhero film awaits the celebrated German-Spanish actor. Popping into the local bar on the corner, he finds Bruno sitting there. As transpires by the minute, Bruno has been waiting for this moment for a long time. And so this eternally overlooked man – one of reunification's losers and a victim of the gentrification of what was once East Berlin – takes his revenge. With Daniel as his target...

3 1/2 Hours

August 13, 1961: The passengers on the interzonal train from Munich to East Berlin learn 3½ hours before crossing the border that the Wall is being built in Berlin. They have 3½ hours to make a life-changing decision: to get off the train or keep going.

The Palace

Set in the Friedrichstadt-Palast music hall in the late 1980s, follows twin sisters as they search for their roots.