Interzone Pictures

The wild West Berlin of the 1980s became the creative melting pot of pop subcultures: music, art and chaos. Before the Iron Curtain fell, anything and everything seemed possible.

A racewalking athlete Maria runs a petrol station with a takeaway shop in a desolate mountain village, she is almost 30 years old, she may have little chance to fulfill her lifelong dream of success but at what cost?

In 1981, Wau Holland and other hackers established the Hamburg based Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The idiosyncratic freethinkers were inspired by Californian technology visionaries and committed themselves to hacker ethics. All information must be free. Use public data, protect private data. But not everyone followed the rules. Computer technology was still in its infancy and the emerging Internet became a projection screen for social utopias. What has become of them? The story of the German hackers, told by the protagonists themselves in a montage of found video and audio material.

A documentary about the underground singer-songwriter Tobias Gruben, his upbringing and his musical career, featuring past live perfomances by himself and cover versions of his songs by contemporary artists.

Film by Aron Krause.