Christian Bau

Detective Peter Flowers has to deal with Nola, the "most beautiful and corrupt woman in the world"...

The attempt to deal with a magazine format. Topic: Work situations. "We had a binding structure. From the idea to completion four weeks à five working days. The beginning was the 1. May, we finished in time; hence the title. Nevertheless, it is not only the result of a concept, but also the masterpiece of several years of cooperation.

A movie that shows conversations with a friend. It longs for clarity, not necessarily wisdom; he is looking for connections that give him meaning. This film gives reason to think about why young people go to the Hitler Youth in the early 1930s and find what they are looking for there.

“Should one turn to high culture, dive into the armed underground, or rather enjoy life?” A perplexing dilemma between art, war, and sex, filmed in 1969 on the stage of the auditorium at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts; the two main actresses were the university's nude models.

Documentary to prevent the closing of the Thedebad in Hamburg-Altona.

Short-documentary about the squat at Amandastraße 73 in Hamburg.

The artist Jürgen Vallen in the port of Hamburg, his favorite workplace. A document of obsession: port, cranes, noises, sounds, pictures, drawings. An exciting meeting of three areas: documentary video/art/music.

With its numerous interviews, the film is an inventory of current forms of resistance. It shows the strength, but also the weakness of the momentary disputes. The story, the practice and the discussion are described in the film – an exciting affair.

In 1937, on behalf of Hitler, a competition was announced among the most important architects in Germany. The task was the redesign of the Hamburg Elbe bank. The face of the city was to be moved from the Alster to the Elbe. In addition to Berlin, Linz, Nuremberg and Munich, the Hanseatic city was thus declared a "Führerstadt". Representation and administrative buildings for the party and the private economy were to be created. The architects involved in the project are interviewed. They reflect their activity and function at that time.

In May 1968, no one passes him by: day and night, Peter Ernst Eiffe, who grew up in a Hanseatic family, is on the road in Hamburg with the felt-tip pen and covers toilets, traffic signs, mailboxes with his sayings. Presumably he is the first graffiti tagger in Germany. Highlight of his career: He drives a Fiat Topolino into the Wandelhalle of the main station and proclaims the "Free Republic of Eiffe". Forcibly admitted to psychiatry, he founded the party »Eiffe Brothers«. Christmas 1983 he escapes from the institution and is found frozen months later. In the 1990s, the filmmaker Christian Bau and Artur Dieckhoff began to deal with Eiffe.

In May 1968, no one passes him by: day and night, Peter Ernst Eiffe, who grew up in a Hanseatic family, is on the road in Hamburg with the felt-tip pen and covers toilets, traffic signs, mailboxes with his sayings. Presumably he is the first graffiti tagger in Germany. Highlight of his career: He drives a Fiat Topolino into the Wandelhalle of the main station and proclaims the "Free Republic of Eiffe". Forcibly admitted to psychiatry, he founded the party »Eiffe Brothers«. Christmas 1983 he escapes from the institution and is found frozen months later. In the 1990s, the filmmaker Christian Bau and Artur Dieckhoff began to deal with Eiffe.

Five young men ride their bicycles through the city, each of them having a piece of a huge movie advertisement attached to his bike.

A documentary about the 'critical mass', the Film Coop, a group of young filmmakers in Hamburg during the 1960s - a small group far from the Mainstream or the New German Cinema.

Years ago, SONY advertised with the slogan “The mobile memory”. We fell for it. The memory faded. The starting situation for the film was this crisis: The half-inch magnetic tapes dissolved and could no longer be played, they squeaked when trying to get them to work. We called it the squeak plague. Our archive threatened to disappear. We started talking about the future. How is everything supposed to go on, the whole thing here? Also the question of video or celluloid and whether we still feel like it at all. If you ask a lot, you get a lot of answers. A fan-like montage of images and sounds about the future was created. In search of social reality, the volume is also an answer, but without patent recipes.

A whimsical depiction of the Hamburg city port (life?).

The documentary accompanies the history of the district, its renovation and the struggle of the population against the urban development determined by investors. With interviews, productions and detailed observations, a complex picture of the people in Altona is painted.

During an art auction, at which Gerhard Richter's “Abstraktes Bild (H.M.)” is being offered for sale, a photo of a dead man appears on the livestream. A paranormal phenomenon?

The title is hopeful, the rest is different - oppressive sexuality, torture. Where should my eyes look when I have to examine eight hours of adult films a day at work in the film copy factory?

On the occasion of the »Construction Days« in the autumn of 1969, the Hamburg Building Authority commissioned five HFBK film students to film one Hamburg commercial each. Christian Bau opted for a critical portrait of Osdorfer Born, Hamburg's first large-scale, prefabricated housing estate, which had been built from 1967 by Neue Heimat, SAGA and other housing companies on the western edge of the city. The images, shot on 16mm, were accompanied by interview passages and a text taken from SAGA's housing construction program. The client was less than enthusiastic, the film disappeared into a closet for decades and can now be shown for the first time in the cinema.

After the Fukushima disaster, a new word was created in the Japanese language, in the calligraphy composed of the terms "atom" and "divorce". Christian Bau created this word in 2011 on the east coast of Japan.

An approach from the outside: the highway, the cows, the construction sites, the skeptical press reports, the police on site, the interior senator, a young Russian German suspects that the Germans have problems with the many Russians. Superstructure Director E. Kossak says: "every district must have something of its own, here deliberately the Fleete; you can paddle directly from here to Hawaii". The next films will show to what extent the first impression is true.

Documentary film essay that links the fate of the New York artist Jimmy Ernst and his parents Max Ernst and Louise Straus with the history of the Augustin printing house in Glückstadt.

Documentary film essay that links the fate of the New York artist Jimmy Ernst and his parents Max Ernst and Louise Straus with the history of the Augustin printing house in Glückstadt.

Film about the Hamburg district of Ottensen and the resistance of the residents against the planned renovation. It was shot from 1972 to 1975.

In 1922, Max Ernst produced a painting entitled “The Rendezvous of Friends”. In surrealist style, it shows his friends from Paris - including Robert Desnos, Hans Arp, Paul Éluard and André Breton - all avant-gardists. The documentary follows the painting's journey from the artist's easel to the Museum Ludwig.