'Be more than a spectator - doing politics in and beyond the cinema' The curtain is rising for globale05 - spectators to protagonists, consumers to producers. The world in close-up for seven days: Exploitation and deprivation of rights, bordercrossing and deportation, war and corporate power, fight and hope. Cinema as a space for a critical public and films as a political medium - in and beyond the movie theatre. The globale is a one week filmfestival that takes place in Berlin, presenting films, organizing discussions and offering workshops for and together with a diverse group of participants. It has a special part dedicated to getting in touch with and starting discussions with pupils and teachers. Until mid-2005 part of the globale05 program is going on tour through different towns in Germany, perhaps even Europe. (Throughout the year we are involved in political fights and activities going on around us, in what we call political interventions: supporting the anti-deportation campaign by our cooperating partner FIB (refugee initiative Brandenburg), participating in the European Social Forum, organizing workshops during left-wing-union conventions with our partner labourB.) Organized by a heterogeneous group of political activists, artists and filmaddicts the globale is an invitation to common reflexion and participation - because political films need political movement.

Source material is a found footage super 8 film. The visual carrier was attacked in a multitude of ways. It was scratched, cut open and violated. I captured an attempt to screen it. There it burned and was destroyed by the projector. Sorry little film. With the video footage I provoked the encoding. As a result some pixels were dislocated. In the end I reshot the film from the monitor while I somehow angered the cables that connect the monitor with my computer. That all may sound very negative and destructive to you dear reader but the goal was an almost humanist one: Unification of the digital with the anologue world. They seem so far apart and yet they aren't. By exposing every material's weaknesses and injuries it was made one. It's all visual sensations in the end. Rita Hayworth grindily sings along.

“If there is a life after this, I would rather be a dog than a human; to be a human being is very exhausting”. That's how Mrs. Wang, Mrs. Duan and Mrs. Yu feel. They are cab drivers in the Chinese metropolis of Xian, colloquially called “taxi sisters”. For more than 10 years they've been driving now, for a minimum of 10 hours a day, every single day of the year – and driving a cab here is no easy task. With work being a strain, contracted debts piling on the pressure, and having to corrupt officials, crooks and gangsters, each day means a real challenge. But while most of their former colleagues are out of work, the “taxi sisters” are considered lucky, as they manage to make their living. We join these three women cruising their city and visit them at home after work. Their touching stories tell us intriguingly about the everyday reality of an uncompromising scheme of economic growth in China. An hommage to the art of survival in hard times: “We don't believe in God or Satan, we just believe in us”.

Atmospherical approach to the Reichstag Building, house of German parliament, through the eyes of two young cleaners with foreign background. Joao leads through the film, posing philosophical questions about work, society and politics. Nihat cleans meticulously letters of a text about the meaning of life, which are embedded into the foundation of the building, but he does not comprehend...

A layered tone poem of found images and woven soundscapes renders a shifting psychogram; a nomadic passage across spaces in and out of time.

A classic documentary on William Burroughs.