Two newspaper reports from the same day mark the beginning of the story: a sparrow is shot dead in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, while a German soldier is killed in an attack in Afghanistan. Scheffner sets out on a journey into a deceptive peace.
Made from images filmed by the Syrian artist Amel Alzakout after the boat on which she was fleeing Syria sank off the coast of Lesbos, Purple Sea reports on the moment in which the co-director and the other passengers are floating in the sea in their lifejackets, waiting to be rescued. Her voice-over accompanies this extremely poignant experience.
The Halfmoon Files is a film on the complex relationships between politics, colonialism, science and media. A film about gaps, omissions and the construction of history. In short: a ghost story.
On June 29, 1992, a farmer in East Germany found two dead bodies in a cornfield. They were Romanian citizens shot by hunters while trying to cross the external EU border. Were they really mistaken for wild boars? The trial began four years later and the accused were acquitted – but the relatives of the dead knew nothing. REVISION is the filmic reworking of a case that appeared to be long closed. The film not only attempts to document what really happened, it also poses the questions: why did two men die on a sunny day in the middle of a field? Who were they? What led them here? The search for answers drove the two filmmakers to sift through investigative files. This led them to new witnesses and to uncovering problems with European asylum policy. Above all, however, it led them to the relatives and their memories of the two dead men.
The old paternal house of the Le family, set in a rural scenery at the fringes of the small town of Ninh Hoa, close to the southern coast of Vietnam: A household dominated by women, neither rich nor poor, with chicken behind the kitchen and rice paddies bordering the plot. Through the everyday life of the inhabitants of the house, the constellation of the extended family becomes visible. A constellation that is fundamentally marked by the course that history took in the second half of the 20th century, and that has made Germany a substantial reference point in the life of the Le family.
On September 14, 2012, a deflating lifeboat with thirteen people onboard was rescued in the Mediterranean. Working from a video filmed by a cruising tourist, the cineast Philip Scheffner offers a concentrated view of the situation in this region, echoing today's violences.
(Self-)portrait of a Roma family living in Berlin, Germany.
