Would you ever think that Reinickendorf and Game of Thrones could have anything in common? Well, neither would we and yet Berlin managed to surprise us once again! Unseen Westeros is a 5-day exhibition that comes to Berlin in January and that no Game of Thrones fan would ever want to miss. And by the way: the entry’s free!
The exhibition is a huge project that 40 international artists have been working on for 3 years. The astonishing result is 80 pieces that will let you immerse into the fantastic world of Game of Thrones landscapes. Urban explorers will be excited to find out that the exhibition will be hosted in a historical industrial hall in Reinickendorf.
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by Michalina | Sep 30, 2018 | Art, Events, TV
Counterpart, photo: STARZ
Berlin has not only become a popular and affordable production location for many of your favorite movies and TV-shows in the last years. But our beloved city at the Spree and its uniquely edgy and rough aesthetic has become the backdrop for many national and international productions. And I think we will all agree, if one a city deserves this visual attention, then it’s Berlin. How many times have we found ourselves thinking the Berlin scenery around us is right out of a movie scene? We selected a few of our favorite shows and movies that will or have already found their way to the big and small screen this year and last year. Take a look.
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by Andy | Apr 11, 2018 | Movies, TV
The web series “After Hours” might not be news to some of you. Actually, the documentary about Berlin’s notorious techno scene already premiered in 2009 on the web portal “3min.de”. However, when the streaming service was discontinued “After Hours” disappeared in internet limbo. Gladly, we can report that you can now watch all 12 episodes right here…
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by Andy | Mar 6, 2018 | Party, TV, Videos
photo: Frédéric Batier/X Filme
Mark your calendars: The highly anticipated TV show “Babylon Berlin” premiers in mid October. Although we rarely get all over excited about German TV shows (sorry), we really can’t wait for this one to air. If there is one place that we wanna time travel back to, it’s the buzzing Berlin of the 1920’s. A metropolis overflowing with creative energy, full of radical extremes in economy and culture, from politics to the underworld. It feels like the mysterious aura of these few years has never left our streets, but so far few shows have done justice to how our imagination makes these times come alive.
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by Andy | Sep 27, 2017 | TV
Berlin is definitely not L.A. Even though the German capital has several production companies and the big Filmstudios Babelsberg right outside the city, during the year the local movie-industry is nearly invisible. Invisible but not non-existent. No wonder they shine even brighter at the biggest festival in Germany for contemporary film culture: Berlinale.
At this year’s edition not only did we have the chance to visit the press previews from several movies but also we got an exclusive backstage tour of the festival including a visit to the photo studio with Canon, sponsor and creative partner of the festival.
We breathed some air of glamour and lots of love and devotion for the art on celluloid while speaking with the team of Berlinale who did not hesitate to answer all our questions and explain us in details everything about the cultural DNA of this celebration of creativity.
After the jump we show you our Backstage discoveries and tell you more about our incredible highlight of the festival.
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by Claudio | Feb 17, 2017 | Movies, Photos, TV
photo: Berlin Station / EPIX
No matter how hard to believe it might prove to be at first, Berlin has hosted the shooting of a variety of tv shows and films, from unknown indies to massive, Hollywood blockbusters, such as Inglorious Basterds and Hunger Games. It is very hard to describe the feeling of watching your beloved city on camera being the centre of a plot that has very little in common with the way you choose to spend your time in the German capital. Here are my favorite picks, when it comes to tv shows and films worthy of binge-watching, that have been shot to a great extent or even entirely in Berlin. Make sure you share with us your opinion/suggestions on the comment section below.
by Nikos | Dec 15, 2016 | Movies, TV, Videos
photos: TNT Serie
“4 Blocks” is a story about the hardships and crime in Neukölln. The series follows protagonist Toni played by Kida Khodr Ramadan and his struggle with daily business in the context of Arabic clans. He wants to leave his “4 Blocks” behind for the sake of his family, but Neukölln doesn’t let him go easily.
With Frederick Lau, who plays a friend of Toni in the series, we fell in love with when we first saw him stirring up chaos in the hit Berlin movie “Victoria”. He became our new face of Berlin and embodied the “real people”. His role was as rough around the edges just like Neukölln is with its beautiful ugliness. Kida Khodr Ramadan does his own part in representing a realer image of Berlin, which is much more diverse.
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by Valerie | Oct 11, 2016 | TV
photos: LeidenSchafft
The Berlin underground scene is one of the most diverse in the world. Makes sense – where there is a large society, there is also an underground, an anti-pole to the mainstream. If you look around the Hip Hop scene nowadays, a lot of things have changed. The subcultural character of Hip Hop seemingly vanished and slowly but steadily German Rap became mainstream. But still, Hip Hop is the voice of the unheard, an organ for the youth and a space for resistance.
Young filmmaker and and photographer Mirza Odabaşı took it upon himself to go back in time, to the origins of Berlin and German Rap culture and met up with a wide range of artists and personalities from the scene. In his documentary LeidenSchafft, a pun from the words “passion”, “misery” and “creation”, Odabaşı goes into the deep meanings of the local Rap culture, talks about identity and finding and defining yourself in and outside of the music. He met up with many icons of the scene, ranging from well-known artists like Marteria, Chefket, Eko Fresh and many more to rather Oldschool trailblazers such as Killa Hakan, Marcus Staiger or Spaiche.
In 43 minutes Odabaşı manages to get into topics such as experiences of social exclusion, some of the possible reasons to why Hip Hop is so popular amongst the alleged socially disadvantaged adolscents and portrays the people shaping the German Hip Hop scene in beautiful images in Berlin.
In that way, “LeidenSchafft” is a look back and an appraisal at the same time, bringing light to the underground. And human emotions.
See some impressions of the film and a teaser after the jump.
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by Yasmin | Apr 15, 2016 | Movies, TV, Videos
sense8, photo: Netflix
It’s been such a long time since we wrote about TV shows, but now that the nights are getting longer and the temperatures lower we are starting to get into hibernation mode, cozying up in our blankets and watching movies and tv shows in the evenings ignoring the wet and cold outside.
For our newest edition of Serie/ous Addiction, we have a wonderful set of shows for you that deal with our most favorite topics in some capacity: Sex, sexuality, gender identity and Berlin! Yes, you heard right: There is a good portion of Berlin in the mix this time, you must have noticed that in terms of movie and tv productions the hype of Berlin has finally reached the world of international television. Of course, you must all have heard by now that the current season of US spy show Homeland was shot here, mostly thanks to star Claire Danes talking awkwardly about her visit at Berghain on Ellen. But this is not the only show that took place here, there is one more taking advantage of the awesomeness of this city, but it’s more of an underdog. Nonetheless, it’s one of my three favorite new TV shows, more about it after the jump.
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by Frank | Nov 27, 2015 | TV
photo: Britta Thie, Translantics
Translantics is a new web series about a group of artists and creative people in Berlin, produced by Schirn Kunsthalle and ZDF in collaboration with ARTE Creative. It was created, written and directed by the artist Britta Thie, who also plays the main character BiBi in the show. The story is about her and her two best friends how they navigate their life and work in Berlin. They’re dealing with the fast-forward life of young ambitious artists who jump from situations of comfort with friends and lovers to awkward encounters with competing artists. Their relationships are continually re-networked and auto-updated. You can feel the loss of intimacy because „emotion, affect, and intelligence have become products on an already flooded market“…
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by Olga | Sep 16, 2015 | TV