MDR

Mireille Mathieu, along with Edith Piaf and Dalida, is part of France's national cultural heritage. The documentary shows the tension between the celebrated and at the same time banished, the ambassador of France in the world, who appears only rarely in her own homeland. Why is Mireille Mathieu, the unusual star, so divisive?

Year 1763, the Seven Years' War is about to end. August III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, has died, leaving empty the royal treasury and an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, jewelry and goldsmith masterpieces, which he considered a symbol of his greatness, and that of Dresden, one of the European capitals of Baroque art.

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

In a small town plunged into darkness, two children, Kyona and Adriel, are separated from their parents and, facing the path of exile alone, embark on a heroic journey that will take them from childhood to adolescence, in search of refuge, peace and the hope of finding their family.

Who are the young people who are involved in the "Fridays for Future" movement and who relentlessly take to the streets for environmental and climate protection? What are their life like and how will their activism be influenced or changed by current events in 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic? The documentary accompanies them and shows how diverse, creative but also exhausting the protest work is, in that the filmmakers impressively tell of the fears, dreams, successes and defeats of the young people portrayed.

Is there still Nazi loot hidden in buried bunkers on the Buchenwald concentration camp? Historians and scientists try to solve an old mystery.

In the Cold War years of the 1970s, an American patrol boat meets a Soviet ship off the east coast of the United States for talks about fishing rights in the Atlantic. In the midst of this, while Russian commanders are aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel where the talks are being held, a Lithuanian sailor jumps across the ten feet of icy water separating the boats. Crash-landing on the deck of the American ship, he desperately begs for asylum. Though they try, the Americans ultimately fail to provide protection and the Soviets are allowed to capture him and brutally return him to their vessel. Thus begins a stranger-than-fiction story of imprisonment, discovery, fame, and freedom. Through rare archival footage and a dramatic first-person re-enactment of that fateful day by Simas Kudirka, the would-be defector himself, this tale of one of the biggest Cold War muddles takes us on a journey of uncanny twists of fate, and the emotional sacrifices of becoming a universal symbol of freedom.

In 1989, thirteen GDR scientists and technicians set off from East Berlin to the Georg Forster research station in the Antarctic. During their expedition the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th. Cut off from the images that go around the world, the men can only experience the historical events passively. When they returned in the spring of 1991, their homeland was a foreign country. The documentary reconstructs the thoughts and feelings of the East German researchers on the basis of eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts, letters, film material, grandiose landscape shots from the location of the action and unique photos to make the consequences of the events tens of thousands of kilometers away on the small GDR expedition in the middle of the eternal ice tangible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first politicians to congratulate Donald Trump on his election as president of the United States in 2016, but over time the relationship between the two heads of state has had its ups and downs. Are they friends or enemies? Has their mutual admiration turned into mutual distrust?

June 1941, during World War II. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders the mass abduction of particularly well-bred young children from Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union in order to be educated in German culture, by both state schools and German families…

Every year in June, the small Bulgarian village of Balgari celebrates St Constantine with a special ritual. Initiated ‘nestinari’ go into a music-induced trance and dance on bonfires in a display of religious passion.

September 1989 in the GDR. With the change of the general mood in the country, the life of 12-year-old FRITZI changes as well. Her best friend Sophie has fled with her mother through Hungary to West Germany and the only thing Fritzi has left is Sophie's little dog Sputnik. But Fritzi misses Sophie just as much as her little four-legged friend does. Therefore, she decides to bring Sputnik to Sophie. But there is only one way to get there: over the strictly guarded border. A very dangerous adventure for a 12-year-old girl and a small dog...