Die Vierte Gewalt

Marie violates tradition in a small German town of Lauscha, to become the first female glassblower in in 1890. Her glass ball decorations find a new market in America.

A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.

Hilla grows up in the 60s, her father is a worker and her mother a charwoman. But she wants a different future for herself, wants to study. After a violent incident she needs a strong shoulder. Who of her life will do?

As a nun, Katharina von Bora lives the life destined for her until she comes into contact with a completely new world of thought in the early 20s through the writings of Martin Luther. She flees with some of her co-sisters and comes without legal status, without income and rejected by her family to Wittenberg, where she meets Martin Luther personally. Katharina decides to marry the reformer and, as his wife, becomes a respected housekeeper, an equal interlocutor and the mother of their children together.

How do we represent the ideas of gender? This short reflects about this topic, as we see an unidentified character, suited up, and with a paper bag over his head, walking down the hallway of its high school.

Juvenile detention or retirement home: That's the choice 17-year-old Malu is faced with after she's been caught stealing again. In order to save the girl from imprisonment, her aunt Johanna agrees to take Malu in with her until she has completed her social service in a retirement home. The rebellious half-orphan, whose single father Paul has hardly any time for her as a pilot, initially finds being placed with her aunt just as restrictive as a stay in prison.

Diagnosis burnout: The successful career woman Toni Lehmstedt can be referred to a psychiatric clinic after a physical breakdown. Urs Egger's free adaptation of the biographical novel of the same name by Miriam Meckel with Grimme award winner Marie Bäumer in the leading role.

When her daughter is kidnapped in Belize and held hostage to be used for human organ trafficking, Kate Johnson goes on a crusade to infiltrate the cartel and rescue her.

Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.

For 18-year-old Finnish–Kosovan Fatu, a simple visit to the grocery store feels as nerve-racking as a lunar expedition: for the first time in his life, he’s wearing makeup in public. Luckily his best friend Rai, a young woman on the spectrum of autism, is there to ferociously support him through the voyage.