S4.E1 ∙ Spike Island

Beto a beekeeper is the guide in this poetic documentary on a Western Sierra Madre village in Mexico: where elders tend to animals while youth are in school, some of them rehearsing for a production of Romeo and Juliet.

The documentary Goli otok presents the history of the concentration camp built on an island at the Croatian northern seashore bearing the same name, during the clashes between Tito and Stalin from 1949 to 1955. The reconstruction of life at the camp and of the methods of political re-building is based on the testimonies of the former prisoner Alfred Pal, while the words of the former general of the Yugoslavian secret political police Jovo Kapicic reveal the establishment's view on the logic's and the motives that led to the creation of the Camp. This documentary also reveals more than a few non-published documents of the Yugoslav secret services shedding new light on the consequences of the Tito-Stalin skirmish that spelled doom for the condemned enemies of the state Stalin's allies.

This is a story of people who never give up, becoming invincible.

The docudrama brings a unique labor dispute to life. Today, continued payment of wages in the event of illness is a matter of course. But workers in the 1950s, unlike employees, received no pay for the first three days of illness and then very little. The workers no longer want to put up with this unequal treatment. Through the lives of Emma and Alfred Freese, a fictional working-class family from Kiel, the challenges of that time are brought to life in all their harshness. Emma is a typical housewife and mother of that time. This time of hardship is seen through her eyes and the Freeses' struggle for a life of dignity is followed. The war and its deprivations have left their mark on this generation, but now things are looking up again. But when her husband Alfred collapses ill at the Howaldtswerft shipyard in Kiel, Emma despairs. He has to take it easy, but how is the family supposed to get by without wages? This cannot go on. In October 1956, up to 34,000 metal workers in the shipyards and factories of Schleswig-Holstein went on strike in the fight for justice and dignity. To this day, this strike is considered the longest in Germany. Employers and politicians stood in the way of the strikers with decisive force. On the employer side of the then booming shipbuilding industry was shipyard boss A. Westphal. Julius Bredenbeck, Herbert Sührig and Hein Wadle are well-known trade unionists to this day, having orchestrated the strike and led it to success.

A "road movie" about the French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) who walks from Naples to Rome in 1831. In the company of two Swedish officers, he experiences beautiful views, gets fleas, drinks sour wine and dances the night away. The program is based on Berlioz's symphony "Harold in Italy", his memoirs and Carl Stephan Bennett's travel diary. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Manfred Honeck.