Topic: Oral History

The Ukranian grandson of filmmaker Leonid Burlaka draws a rich picture of Soviet history with archive footage of his grandfather.

In her documentary, Mračnikar formulates a political urgency in a personal way: What happens when your mother tongue is taken away from you?

A multi-layered drama that skillfully explores how both feelings and memories stay locked away in post-reunification East Germany.

In the documentary, which was successfully screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, gays and lesbians from the former GDR have their say.

In the 1970s, Peter Brückner was an iconic figure of the German New Left and was the first university professor to lose tenure for political reasons.

Young people from the former border region use smartphones to film stories from their personal environment about the topic of German division.

Victims of the repressive system in the former East German state give powerful testimony about the cruetly of the dehumanizing regime.

Contemporary witnesses from several European countries provide impressive insights into how the Iron Curtain shaped life across the continent.

Survivors can also be victims in countries where injustice was the norm. Their compelling testimonies are featured in this insightful documentary.

The loving portrait of a life on a lurching course, but one that never went off the rails.

Based on his origins and personal background, director Sobo Swobodnik analyzes the social fabric of society and the German education system.

Can a documentary depict reality? Should it even try? Constanze Ruhm examines how reality and the construction of reality are different.

The statements of former inmates of the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison and former Stasi employees are contrasted here.

Stay or go? In the year before the fall of the Wall, a group of dancers have to decide whether to stay in the GDR or flee to the West.

This ambitious directorial debut chronicles lesbian lifestyles and social networking in Vienna in the 1950s and 60s.

At the age of 19, Raja was deported to Nazi Germany and was forced to do labor on a Bavarian farm. This documentary is her story.

During World War 2, 45,000 psychiatric patients died in French hospitals. Only one facility opposed the carnage: the asylum in Saint-Alban.

Six very different lesbian women talk about their lives and loves in the socialist system of the GDR.

During the cold war, West Germany hid its institutionalized human rights abuse in residential care facilities.

A pastor’s daughter composes a mosaic of photos and film fragments to explore the myth, the relevance, and the future of the Parsonage.

After the end of World War 2, 238 German women make a new start in Iceland, following an advertisement from the Icelandic Farmers' Association.

A filmmaker discovers evidence of a Wehrmacht massacre in Italy in his grandfather's estate and investigates the case himself.

Transporting baskets full of hand grenades and secret messages through Nazi roadblocks was just a part of Annitas work during WW2.

The moving life story of Mario Röllig, who fell in love with a gay West German politician in the mid-80s and was imprisoned for it.

A portrait of El Hedi ben Salem, the actor of the Arab guest worker Ali from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film "Ali – Fear Eats The Soul".

ZOWNIR: RADICAL MAN is the portrait of Miron Zownir, one of the most censored photographers, filmmakers and crime novelists of our time.

A personal take on Turkish history by director Ufuk Emiroğlu. It's a mosaic of a film, which moves freely between documentary, fiction and animation.

An historian who survived the concentration camps, Otto Dov Kulka grants insights into his long-hidden world of thoughts.