In nature, a couple is a male and a female. Well, not always! A couple is also a female and a female. Or a male and a male. You may not know it, but homosexuality isn’t just a human story.

*World Premiere – 2021 International Animation Film Festival Annecy

Film classics like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago” made Omar Sharif a world star. He was an actor, bridge player, nomad, womanizer and loved life. This portrait shows a man full of contradictions, who loved playing bridge more than the film business and who lived half of his life in hotels.

A recently discovered archive reveals the story of the extraordinary life of the model agent Emmeline Snively, who ran the Blue Book Model Agency in Hollywood in post-war America. Many famous models, including Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield, started out at this modeling agency. Emmeline Snively was a Mother of Beauty for hundreds of models. She taught them how to walk and talk and even sent them out to get platinum blond hair or plastic surgery. The need to be pretty in post-war Hollywood was a phenomenon, and Emmeline Snively understood that.

This documentary reconstructs the way Emmeline created beauty and shows what’s left of it after all these years. The theme throughout the entire film is the meaning of beauty. Memories of youth, experience, aging and mortality create a history of time and place filled with humor, sadness and everything in-between, as these men and women navigated Hollywood and all its promises. A film about dignity, beauty and getting old.

Ida Haendel is considered a legend among professional musicians and listeners of classical music alike. This documentary utilizes footage that was shot between 2009 and 2017, showing the life and work of British-Polish violinist Ida Haendel.

After having given her final performance, her everyday life oscillates between nostalgia and joy of living, between loneliness and hopefulness. Ida Haendel is a person of wisdom and humor, whole-heartedly accepting the challenge of spending her remaining years in a self-determined way. Though at some point she has to accept she can’t play the violin anymore, she refuses to stop singing.

“The Haendel Variations” is not an ordinary music documentary, it is not just another portrait of a world-renowned classical musician. Its rather restrained, more intimate approach focuses on the inner life of an extraordinary woman and on the two things that still give her life meaning: her love for music and for her fellow human beings.

Rain or shine, storm or chill; all year long the world is queuing up to see the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Who are all these visitors? Where are they from? And why are they here? This film watches the queue through the course of the four seasons, in search of stories from all over the globe.

Interviews with people from the line – both before and after their visit to the Secret Annex show how repression, discrimination, and dehumanization transcend the boundaries of time. We also learn that everyone in his own way feels connected to this extraordinary place. Personal stories are interspersed with passages from Anne Frank’s diary, read in many different languages by girls about the same age as Anne at the time.

Meanwhile we get an impression of everyday life as it unfolds around those waiting in line the canal boats, the street musicians, the ticket seller, the homeless man – For all its poignancy ”In Line for Anne Frank” is a document that also inspires hope.

Nominee Rockie Awards (History & Biography)