Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Time

When Werner Herzog was still a child, his father was beaten to death before his eyes. His mother was overwhelmed with his upbringing and thereupon shipped him off to one of the toughest youth welfare institutions in Freistatt. This was followed by a career as a bouncer in the city's most notorious music club and an attempt to start a family. Today, the 77-year-old from Bielefeld lives with his dog Lucky in a lonely house in the country. Despite adverse living conditions, he has survived in his own unique and inimitable way.

Second Skin takes an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. An emerging genre of computer software called Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, allows millions of users to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Of the 50 million players worldwide, 50 percent consider themselves addicted.

Cao Fei recorded her experiences within the online social platform Second Life. The result is a wistful, surreal vision of an alternative reality sprung from the pop culture fantasies and hyper-consumerism of contemporary urban China, while also trying to transcend its real-life limitations. It can be seen as an answer to the challenge posed by River Elegy: how to envision a new Chinese destiny founded on principles of individuality, creativity, discovery, and freedom. The film also reflects the contemporary condition of the virtual supplanting our experience of the real.

It's quite incredible: this girl is a loving, faithful wife, never a slip or a glance out of place, and now she's met 6 lovers in three months! It's because she leads a double life: on the one hand, cushy evenings at home with her little husband, and on the other, torrid evenings flirting with hotties under the pseudonym Quecoeur. And the husband? He says nothing. Or not much, but he's watching. This is "Second Life" (SL for those in the know): the chance to build a new, more exciting life on your computer...

In a few clicks, they can connect girls, make new friends in Sydney or Bamako, become a videographer or photographer, show their buttocks to a virtual friend in Berlin, meet anorexics, put their music online hoping to become famous... Welcome to the new "teen planet", where, it seems, we are more comfortable in the digital jungle than in real life. Ready to do anything to become celebrities via the Net, like the "Suicide girls", young adults posing naked on the Web who have become real idols for young girls, teenagers chat, download and publish their content at a hundred per hour: a set of techniques and knowledge that their parents often master very badly. To better understand this silent revolution underway among teenagers, for whom the Web has become the symbol of a new way of life and a tool for self-promotion, Stéphanie Kaim went to meet some young cybernauts.

Laiila’s journey that looking for an answer to the questions that plagued her mind. In the middle of her journey, Ale comes to help Laiila to define what happiness truly is.

On the surface it is an idyll. He lives a happily married life with Judit, a teacher and their eight-year old son, Dani. His best friend, Zoli is also his business partner and between the two of them they own four flourishing bakeries in Budapest. An enviable setting. But in the background a time bomb is ticking away. For years Andris has been living a passionate and blessed second life. The scene is Poland. Pretending to be making business trips, he has been spending half the year in Cracow, with Bea. She is a beautiful young woman and a church-painter. In this life Andris paints Creation in the chapel near the city. He is sensitive and gifted in what he does. In Pest he is a talented businessman, in Cracow an excellent artist. It is as if there were two people in him. What's more: he is satisfied with both lives. And since he is also an excellent conspirator, until this early morning he has never had to make a choice. But now Bea is pregnant, and would like to marry him...

Caridad is a woman who lives disconnected from her reality due to the loss of her son, a situation she has not been able to overcome since then, so she enters an emotional state in which reality and fiction combine with each other, preventing She can distinguish between them.

A girl trying to live a normal life, little does she know the danger that lurks behind her…

This honest and often blackly hilarious film shows Martyn at home in Ireland, during the lead-up to and aftermath of an operation to have one of his legs amputated below the knee. Contributors include sometime collaborator and buddy Phil Collins, the late Robert Palmer, Ralph McTell, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, fellow hellraiser bassist Danny Thompson, John's ex-wife Beverley Martyn and younger generation fan Beth Orton. We see a man incapable of compromising his creative vision, from his folk club roots in the Sixties, through a career of continuous musical experimentation. Along the way there is a surreal roll-call of accidents and incidents, including a collision with a cow

On Her Majesty’s Service follows Gary Barlow as he embarks on a mission to record a special song to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. He writes the melody with Lord Lloyd Webber, but wants performers from around the Commonwealth to play on it. Prince Charles gives Gary some suggestions before he begins an extraordinary trip, recording a vast number of musicians on their home turfs to make the unique record "Sing".