Two childhood friends in their thirties reunite in their hometown. In a workshop, teenagers are asked to imagine their future selves. An uncle fakes his own death and disappears. And all of them are connected by the lifelong question of whether they truly have the freedom to reinvent themselves.

Together with director Ella Cieslinksi, we co-created the film. We did this as longtime friends and poured all our energy and cinematic vision into the film. The film was produced independently and without conventional sources of funding.

SHAHID is the Debut Film of Narges Kalhor in which the main Character ‚Narges’ is persecuted by a group of Mullahs throughout the film. The uncanny men, that also represent ‚Narges’ past, roots and Iranian tradition have their own way of moving and dance. Together with the other performers I created the movement material to then choreograph the scenes in close cooperation with the director Narges and the cameraman Felix Pflieger.

During the winter of 2019/20 I spent four months in the central arctic on the German icebreaker Polarstern. My colleague Lars Barthel and I were sent by UFA Show & Factual to shoot documentary footage during leg II of the one-year-long scientific expedition MOSAiC. Polarstern was frozen into the ice, drifting across the north pole and accommodating 50 international scientists and 50 crew members. Being part of the journey during polar night we didn’t see any daylight until the very last week at the beginning of March when a Russian exchange icebreaker arrived and we eventually set sail home. It is still difficult to find words to describe the experience. UFA Show & Factual produced several films about the entire expedition that were broadcasted on German national television and other TV channels.

Together with my long-time collaborator Felicitas Sonvilla I created and realized a documentary series of six episodes about masculinity. The series attempts to inspire an open discussion of this sensitive but universal topic in everyday life. It’s about asking questions and crossing barriers that often keep us from finding answers. We interviewed 30 young men in Berlin, resulting in honest, fearless and sometimes humorous dialogues. After each interview we asked our protagonists to choose a song and dance for the camera.

A photo camera, a person, a projection. Any possible relationship to be discovered and explored while individual rhythms are at work and hearable. Raising, slowing down, sometimes going alongside, sometimes missing each other. Who is in control and how many eyes are looking? When do stills become movement and can a body ever be still? The work is an exploration of image making, the quality of perspectives and the question of how do we perceive and remember movement. It was created as a graduation work for HZT Berlin and first schown on 13th of September 2022 in Ufer Studios Berlin.

This documentary on the Nobel prize-winning author Peter Handke was my first feature work as a camera person. I spent about 20 days filming with Handke in Paris, Frankfurt and Serbia. The film premiered at Locarno Film Festival in 2016. It shows Mr. Handke as a young man and accompanies him in his daily life today, always devoted to language, posing questions such as: Where are we now? And, to quote one of his early films: How to live?

Between 2018 and 2021 I created about 10 documentations for the Julia Stoschek Collection. I always enjoyed having unique access to the exhibitions and spent many hours alone with the art works. Since I mostly showcased video works in the films one interesting question accompanied me frequently – how to show and edit the video works within a video? You can watch the documentaries in the archive of the Julia Stoschek Collection. Among others I was lucky to document the exhibitions of Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, A. K. Burns, Stan Douglas, Jeremy Shaw and the performances of Colin Self and Jason Moran at JSC Berlin.

For MY LONESOME HOLOGRAM Daniel Hengst and  I worked with the novel of A. B. Casares “The Invention of Morel”. During the performative VR-Installation the visitor is guided through several steps that introduce the tale of Casares, dealing with the creation of a hologram, leading to a visit on an island where you meet your own hologram as well as others and their voices. The installation was performed twice, once at Dok Fest Leipzig in 2016 and once at HFF Munich.