Irina Potapenko

Alex, an ex-con working as muscle in a Vienna brothel, dreams of escaping with his girlfriend Tamara, who also works there. Their attempt to break free sets off a chain of events that links their fate with a rural police officer and his troubled marriage. As their lives intersect, a quiet struggle unfolds between guilt, grief, and the desire for redemption.

Unites grotesque elements, tempo, quiet dream sequences, the thrill of a detective story, but above all, he manages to capture the temperature of an actor ensemble that throws itself into the world of Dostoyevsky with immense pleasure and passion.

Two policemen are stationed on Amrum, a North Sea island on the West coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’ – an elder, and one who is several decades his junior. Life is easy, just that the junior can’t find a wife, because no young woman seems to be interested in the peaceful life on the island. All of a sudden, a wounded lady who turns out to be one of two bodyguard for a threatened witness who lives in hiding on Amrum, bursts into the police station and seeks help from the two officers. I missed some bits of the plot, but somehow, the second one of the bodyguards hiding the witness on the island has been killed already, and the second one, seeking help from the local police, was wounded in the incidence, and then she apparently succumbs, too.

In dystopian Germany - just a breath away from our current reality - the return of the wolf triggers a mysterious fascination among the citizens. When journalist Leo Bernstein sets out to investigate, he gets drawn into a long-forgotten fairy tale that places him in great danger.

Before Dawn charts the years of exile in the life of famous Jewish Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, his inner struggle for the "right attitude" towards the events in war torn Europe and his search for a new home.

Neukölln, a trendy district in Berlin. Living space is scarce here. Without surety, proof of credit worthiness and salary there is no chance at all now. Thies knows this game; he works for a real estate management company and watches that the rules are upheld - until he meets Bruno and Sonja. He provides the dissimilar siblings with a flat free of charge on the quiet. And enters into an affair with the brother. Step by step he becomes more deeply immersed in the secret of the "siblings". A Berlin film about a loner who gets caught up. About a couple with unclear residency status. About a city everyone wants to live in.

An immigrant family wants to bring grandmother's ashes to Germany, in a cookie jar. But they did not expect the conscientious compliance of German customs officials at the airport.

Psychologist Kara Bischoff and LKA Commissioner Sibylle Deininger, once a couple, are reunited by a brutal murder case.

Geir is a Norwegian middle-aged bachelor waiting for his Russian wife to be. Tina is young and beautiful. Set as an exploration of their first few weeks together, A Marriage tells a tale of fragile love.

Fabian Groys, a renowned journalist for a political news magazine, enjoys great freedom, since the stories he uncovers make for good sales. When he loses a hot story about the German army, the editor saddles him with a young female intern. Fabian hates teamwork and sticks the intern with what seems a classic tabloid story about the suicide of a man who had himself torn to shreds by a lion at the zoo. But thanks to the intern’s dogged determination, signs emerge that the story Fabian was working on and the gory zoo story are actually interlinked. Is it pure coincidence? And if it isn’t, how can Fabian fight a nebulous enemy?

Agnes, a teacher from the Hessian provinces, has come to Berlin to identify a dead girl who might be Lydia, her runaway daughter. It turns out not to be Lydia, but Agnes stays in the city anyway. Still frantically looking, she comes a young stray called Ines who no longer leaves her side...

Welcome to 2020: The European Union has collapsed following the fourth Gulf War and massive barricades keep illegal immigrants out of cities that are barely functioning. In the middle of this highly volatile environment is the family of Walter Kuper, an energy conglomerate executive. Walter’s daughter, Cecilia, has joined the Black Storm terrorist group. Her sister Laura must choose between motherhood and the man she loves; their brother Philip has been called up to fight for Germany in a hopeless war to secure the last remaining oil fields. Starring leading actors Daniel Brühl, Johanna Wokalek and Jürgen Vogel, "The Days to Come" asks provocative questions about the current state of things as it depicts personal and political realities in a scarily believable near–future.

The dull daily routine of an insurance agent, who listlessly drives down the highway every day and conducts customer meetings while longing for his family, becomes a metaphor for a life that has come to a standstill and is threatened with being crushed by loneliness.

Four cigarette-smoking, alcohol-drinking, troublesome adolescents wander between the concrete skyscrapers of downtrodden West-German suburbia. These uncouth youths are surprisingly not boys but girls with attitude, quick-tempers and foul-mouths, who violently vent their scorn on any unfortunate soul who gets in their way.

Primary school teacher Sabine Schuster suffers a sudden stroke during a theatre rehearsal with her pupils. Doctors are able to save her life in hospital, but the path back to everyday life is difficult and uncertain. For Sabine's husband Stefan, a forester, nothing is as it was either. While Sabine has to laboriously relearn things that are taken for granted, such as speaking or walking, in rehab, Stefan adapts the house in Ilmenau, Thuringia, to his wife's needs in the hope that the familiar surroundings will do her good. But Sabine is so disappointed by her condition that she initially resists everything that will help her recover. Out of shame, she avoids contact with her usual surroundings. She misses her work as a teacher and hiking. Seemingly lost in the mill of the care system, the new nurse Iryna, organized by Stefan, brings new hope with her very own, optimistic and demanding manner.

During an unannounced visit to Berlin, Jakob and Hanna let their three grown up children know that they are no longer able to support them financially. Karla, Arnolt and Sonni seem to live successful city lives; but, on closer inspection, they are in the middle of different life-crises, which have a common cause: lack of independence. After a big family quarrel and a painful revelation of life-lies, every single relative is made aware of how little he or she knows about the others – though still interdependent.