28/03/2017 - A total of six German (co-)productions have been invited to Toronto for North America's most important documentary film festival

A total of six films and co-productions will be representing documentary filmmaking from Germany at the 36th edition of Hot Docs (April 27 to May 7, 2017), North America's most important festival in this field, two of which will world-premiere there, while a third one will screen as an international premiere. 

Matthias Heeder and Monika Hielscher’s Pre-Crime as well as Karin Jurschick’s Playing God will both have their world premieres in the Special Presentations section, which presents high-profile premieres, award-winning films or works by well-known directors. Both films raise questions about our current system of values. The events in the former, produced by Kloos & Co. Medien, sound as if they come from a science fiction novel that becomes alarming reality when forecasting software, algorithms and databases become the new forecasters of future crimes – which leads to the question: how much are we prepared to accept for the sake of security? 

The latter, Playing God, coproduced by Bildersturm Filmproduktion with Dutch partners, focuses on Ken Feinberg, America's most famous specialist for compensation claims, but the documentary shows more than just the story of an occasionally omnipotent, yet always acute and charismatic player: it questions what happens within our Western system of values when economic interests and personal fates interlock through tragedy, whilst offering a deep insight into the soul of American society.

The other sections see the subjects of German documentaries ranging from the world of politics in Germany through music from the Sahel region to the extraction of raw materials and the balance of nature.

Meuthen’s Party by Marc Eberhardt, a student at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, will have its international premiere in the Democrazy sidebar. The film follows Jörg Meuthen, a candidate for the regional parliament elections.

The World Showcase sidebar has programmed the experimental short mining documentary Cold Valley by Florian Fischer and Johannes Krell, which won the 2016 German Short Film Award in Gold and was selected at Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand. In the same section, the North-American audience will discover the German/Indian/Finnish coproduction Machines by Rahul Jain. 

Neopan Kollektiv’s Story of Sahel Sounds, produced by Home Run Pictures, shot on three continents and financed in part by crowd funding, is screening in Artscapes. Around Christopher Kirkley's ‘Sahel Sounds’ project, the film, which is neither a classic portrait, nor a straightforward music documentary, overcomes cultural and geographical distances to celebrate music and question political structures.

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