S1.E13 ∙ Humor

Secondary school students from East Berlin are taking final exam in West Berlin (being politically rejected in GDR) as the Berlin wall is built. The dramatization is combined with interviews of the actual people 50 years later.

The landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. It captures the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

It hasn't been so very long since rich tourists from around the world came to stay in the luxury hotels of Sharm El Sheikh. But the Arab Spring and the confusion of the post revolutionary period quickly robbed the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula of its charm as a go-to summer resort. An Egyptian filmmaker and a visual artist from Germany demonstrate that partially staging their work needn't be at odds with authenticity. In their documentary, saturated with elements of surreal fiction, they set out to visit the last inhabitants of the shimmering city of ghosts - resort employees who feverishly dream among the abandoned hotel suites. How hard is it to balance a traditional lifestyle with the unbridled liberalism of a place in a Middle Eastern wasteland where an island of Western razzle-dazzle is slowly sinking?

Dawn vibrates in New York as it extends on a body waking up. Half-covered by sheets, it's a body which will never disclose itself entirely, even when caught in the midst of the sexual act: Em is an escort girl and, what's more, a heroine addict: just the right elements which Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's first film presents so as to get rid of them as fast as possible. From New York to Los Angeles via Pittsburgh, Em's daily life is revealed, at first, as an antithesis of pre-conceived ideas about her, questioning the spectator's desire in relation to documentary film. Do we have to look at Em the way she looks at the people passing by down the street, through her hotel window? Drugs are invisible, at least in words, and sex is no more than a Pop-Shakespearian performance filmed in HD. Around work, steps to go in and get out of it: shifts, makeup, waiting... Em's true life and a certain portrait of the United States rise out of this daily routine seemingly punctuated by slow times. Her confessions reveal dreams of independence and the presence of what is far away, of attraction and disgust towards others. If, in the end, this 16mm picture seems to welcome the character's secret liberation, the spectator will surmise that it is Em who has seized the film: from now on, it is she who will be re-modeling it.

In February 2011, inspired by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a group of young people of color in Gothenburg, Sweden, organized themselves and formed the Panthers for the Restoration of the Suburbs.

We don't really play for fun. Mostly, we play for work. It's the same for other jobs where you have to survive in competition. This work just happens to be a game.