The “Peladao”, the largest amateur football tournament in the world, unites the two great passions of brazilians: football and women. Located in the Amazon rainforest, in Manaus, thousands of players and hundreds of beauty queens are competing to win. The Peladao is unique.
The film by Albert Knechtel and Alex Bellos follows the organizer Arnaldo Santos and the samba dancer Layana and a soccer team from the tribe of the Sataré Maué.
The dreams of glory, the disappointment in the defeat and a glimpse behind the scenes of an amateur tournament, which is not free of corruption, shows an exciting and surprising view of the brazilian society.

An official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, MANHUNT tells the remarkable true story of the two-decade search for the world’s most notorious terrorist.
The film explores the controversy that ensued when the Bush administration secretly authorized the use of “black site” prisons and 12 “enhanced interrogation techniques” to gather information from captured terrorists.
MANHUNT is a unique insider account that puts a human face on the secret world of intelligence gathering. It offers a reminder that these CIA analysts, targeters and operatives aren’t trained soldiers like those who successfully raided Abbottabad. They are, in many ways, like everyone else. For them, however, debates about the morality of their choices aren’t an abstract philosophical discussion, but an everyday part of the job.

The film explores the real and perceived threat of homegrown Islamic extremism in America today through first-hand accounts from those on the front lines of this battle – family members of convicted terrorists, those trying to persuade young people from embracing extremism, Muslim Americans facing fear and suspicion in their communities, victims of terrorist attacks, and insights from experts and prosecutors who worked homegrown terrorist cases. Among the questions the film raises: Why are American citizens signing up for ISIS? How big is the threat, and how effective have the efforts of US counter-terrorism agencies been in combatting homegrown terrorism? What are the unintended consequences of such efforts? And, what freedoms and values do we sacrifice in our efforts to track down established and nascent extremists in our midst?

The story of the most ambitious project ever conceived on the Internet. In 2002 Google began to scan millions of books in an effort to create a giant global library, containing every book in existence. They had an even greater purpose – to create a higher form of intelligence, something that HG Wells had predicted in his 1937 essay “World Brain”. But over half the books Google scanned were in copyright, and authors across the world launched a campaign to stop Google, which climaxed in a New York courtroom in 2011. A film about the dreams, dilemmas and dangers of the Internet.

Each year during Ramadan, more than a hundred of the best young students from more than 70 countries across the Islamic world converge on Cairo for Egypt’s International Holy Koran Competition, one of the Islamic world’s most prestigious contests. Some of the competitors are as young as seven, and several have memorized the entire 600-page Koran without actually speaking Arabic.
KORAN BY HEART follows two boys and one girl as they go head-to-head with other children, some nearly twice their age, and spotlights the second- and third-place winners, who inhabit an environment caught between fundamentalist and moderate visions of Islam.

Is there a paradise? And if so, what is it really then: the standstill of time, a five-star holiday under palm trees or even a political utopia of equality of all people? The land of milk and honey, where wealth is measured in happiness and the hip movement sets the pace? Jacques Maigne and Albert Knechtel went in “Mission Paradise” to a cinematic world tour to find answers to these questions. On this trip they have met people, who showed them an insight into their “paradise” granted – including the theologian Adolf Holl in Vienna, the historian Jean Delumeau in France, the diver Mako Lacinnik in Tahiti and, Yola Castro, a waitress at a luxury hotel in Cuba , “Mission Paradise” is a log of this world trip

The series plunges the spectator into the heart of contemporary Egyptian history, interweaving the major themes of the Army, the Moslem Brotherhood, International Relations and the role of Civil Society. 
From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar Sadat, to Hosni Mubarak, the series follows the path of the successive regimes in power, and reveals their common goal to carefully lay the basis of a solid independence, but which, on the other hand, led to the revolution on Tahrir Square in 2011.

It is a gigantic secret authority, a service that operates entirely in secret: The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has thousands of civil servants with false names and false passports in order to come to foreign state secrets. But the BND is mired in a crisis of confidence. A wiretapping scandal after another rocked the Authority.The focus of the film is a critical examination of the cooperation of the BND with the NSA. But also the realignment of the German foreign intelligence service after the german reunification and after the attacks of 9/11. In this documentation BND critics, senior representatives from government and parliament and former employees of the BND will talk on camera.

A country like a continent: Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world. Besides megacities like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, there are sparsely populated, rural areas. A network of roads runs through this vast country. Here they are on the go, the brazilian Asphalt Cowboys with their trucks. The Trucker life is hard, the rest stops its fixed points in life.
The five-part documentary series follows five local truck drivers on their trips across Brazil. Viewers encounter large herds of cattle, breathtaking sceneries and exciting characters far away from Copacabana and samba.

Istanbul, european capital of culture in 2010, is confusing and enchanting at the same time. The five-part series “Bosporus” not only shows the beauty and flair of this metropolis, but also the contradictions and the energy emanating from this fast-growing region on the waterway.

The Siemens exiderdome,, a multimedia installation, also called “The World of Automation”, is the biggest marketing campaign that Siemens has ever undertaken. Presented by Siemens Energy & Automation the exiderdome is a travelling technology expo that has already impressed more than 130.000 visitors across Asia, Russia, Mexico, Canada and the USA. For the first leg of its U.S. tour, the mobile two-storied structure of the exiderdome has been set up on an ocean-going barge thus becoming the largest floating trade show of all times.

Berlin meets Lusaka – from the German urban jungle to the African bush. Fabulous images of an unknown world tell the story of a German-African couple with typical Berlin roots having a traditional village wedding in Zambia. But wedding bells in Africa ring to a rather different tune.The footage was originally intended as a wedding present for two friends in Berlin, but renowned Husum cameraman Frank-Peter Lehmann has succeeded in creating a wonderful documentary full of humour, warmth, happiness and sheer joy. .(“Catalog Nordische Filmtage Lübeck 2004”)

On the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosed cases of AIDS, FRONTLINE examines one of the worst pandemics the world has ever known. After a quarter-century of political denial and social stigma, of stunning scientific breakthroughs, bitter policy battles and inadequate prevention campaigns, HIV/AIDS continues to spread rapidly throughout much of the world. Through interviews with AIDS researchers, world leaders, activists, and patients, FRONTLINE investigates the science, politics, and human cost of this fateful disease and asks: What are the lessons of the past, and what can be done to stop AIDS?

1992, the German Historical Museum acquired a painting of the artist Louis de Silvestre. Silvestre operated at the Dresden court in the 1st half of the 18th century. When its authenticity became questionable, it was technologically examined in the restoration workshopas in 1997. Under complicated conditions, art historians and restorers started an investigations and found out, that it was an original portrait from the 18th century, which has been repainted in the early 20th century.
The museum decided to recover the original painting from it’s early 20th century overpainting to show the original Maria Josepha’s the elder from the 18th century. It was such unusual case, that it was decided to film the whole process of the restauration.