FIRST STEPS: Best Documentary
FIRST STEPS Award 2010 in the Documentary category was awarded yesterday evening:
“Ein Sommer voller Türen” (A Summer Full of Doors) directed by Stefan Ludwig, from the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich.
The jury’s comments: The camera is reserved but gets in close to the young people who collect money for a charity organization by doing door to door ‘charity mugging’. The film follows them as they convince an embittered and ill-tempered pensioner to donate money and end up ripping him off. Some of the kids are proud and satisfied with themselves when they get people to give them money. While some of the kids are self-critical and doubtful about the ties between collecting money and earning money. The film addresses the subject without making any moral commentary. In the end, it’s the relentlessly neutral camera 
that prompts questions about what this money grabbing means for the kids’ lives and for our society as a whole when the manager of the sales team praises his sellers because their work keeps a large part of our social system alive. The film deals intimately with these questions without forcing the characters to do the talking for it.
Inspired by re-visiting the 
Looking for late 80s techno flyers? Issues of German teen mag BRAVO from the 50s to today? Tapes, videos or fanzines of local punk, Goth or Emo scenes? Press clippings about moral panic that youth cultures have invariably caused, be it rowdy ducktail sporting Teddy Boys, nihilistic punks, graveyard robbing Goths, Ecstasy popping ravers, trainbombing sprayers or ultra soccer fans? An archive nestled in an unassuming commercial courtyard space in the quieter part of Berlin district Kreuzberg will provide all of the above and more. 
