documentaries

Anja Baron

USA | 2004 | 88mins | Beta | Colour and Black & White

The cinema verite, behind-the-scenes story of some of the last living jazz pioneers from the 1920s and 1930s. This filmic journey, which unfolds over the course of four years, accompanies these often legendary musicians from recording studio, concerts around the globe and teaching jazz, to hospital beds, musical fundraisers and funerals. At its core is one of the longest running bands in jazz, the NY-based Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, founded by Dr. Albert Vollmer more than thirty years ago, and today one of our last links to the earliest roots of jazz. Its members range from Fats Waller's guitarist and Frank Sinatra's drummer to Louis Armstrong's pianist and Duke Ellington's vocalist.

Along the way we meet the band members' lifelong friends and colleagues, including Lionel Hampton, Milt Hinton, Jonah Jones, Jay McShann and Tony Bennett as well as top jazz critics and historians, such as Dan Morgenstern and Nat Hentoff. Together they tell the story behind the story of jazz, infused with the unbreakable spirit that has been the hallmark of their music.

I quickly discovered [them] to be living embodiments of an art form and of an era that would die with them. - Anja Baron

Bertram Verhaag

Germany | 2004 | 95mins | Beta | Colour

In the mid-eighties science, with the help of genetic technology, finds the key to master-ing the earth and especially its creatures. Suddenly, everything seems possible!

Twenty years later we embark on a journey to explore the continual genetic manipulation of plants, animals and human beings.In India a genetically-modified cotton crop drove many farmers to ruin. In Canada genetically-modified canola seeds blow onto the fields of neighbouring organic farms, thus making ecological farming impossible. The Icelandic parliament sells the entire pool of genes of its population to a private company that, in turn, intends to turn over the data at a profit to the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies.

The naked greed of the biotechnology industry is illustrated by a "vampire project" in Peru and Ecuador where scientists took blood, hair and saliva samples from indigenous tribes on the verge of extinction under the pretext of preventive health. Instead these gene samples, the purest in the world, wandered into the laboratories of industry to provide the basis for valuable patents.Worldwide only a handful of idealistic scientists are defying industry.

Peter Woditsch

Belgium | 2002 | 64mins | Beta | Colour and Black & White | Subtitled

For centuries tales of Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great's wildly erotic exploits have fuelled our imaginations. But at the heart of the legends was a real room - a room crawling with images of carnal love. The furniture, paintings, sculptures, walls and ceilings were rampant with the most sensual depictions of sexual congress. Last seen by German soldiers in the winter of 1941, the room's exotic contents have vanished. Or have they?

Award-winning filmmaker Peter Woditsch takes us through both fire and war to follow the trail of lies, deception, art trafficking, greed and desire that circle one of the greatest collections of erotic art the world has ever known.