Society & Culture Episodes

Oleksii Isakov holds a Master in Intercultural Communication Studies and a Bachelor in Linguistics and Translation Studies. His main focus is literature and film. He was born in Odesa and has been living in Germany for the last ten years working at the European-University Viadrina in Frankfurt a.d. Oder - the only university in Germany with a professorship for Ukrainian History, which says a lot about Ukraine's perception in Germany - and throughout the world. In preparation for our conversation...

In our first episode of the new season, our guest is film director, screenwriter, and creative producer Mariia Ponomarova (1991, Kyiv). Mariia studied film directing and screenwriting at Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema & Television in Ukraine graduating cum laude in 2013. Focusing on character development in film during her course, Mariia graduated from the Master of Film artistic research program in 2016 at the Netherlands Film Academy. Short fiction and documentary ...

Shelter and housing is taken for granted for most of us. And when we speak of lockdown we generally think of it as an isolation within our own very comfortable four walls. But what about our fellow humans who are not fortunate enough to have a place of their own, who don’t have this very basic need covered? How does the pandemic beat down on their already unimaginably harsh reality? Going through a second and third lockdown, it is worth remembering that there are others less fortunate than us - ...

Oska Melina Borcherding is a director, actor, dancer and musician from the beautiful city of Berlin. I got to know Oska during the Ierapetra Film Festival on Crete in Greece, where he was running with his short film “Giagia” (which is Greek for “grandmother”). It is a beautiful film about the days following the death of his Greek grandmother and how her legacy and memory is preserved in the stories shared by her family and by the characters she helped shape. He is planning a sequel to the film w...

Erik Penny is a US songwriter, musician and painter who has been living in Berlin for more than 12 years. Erik grew up in El Paso, Texas, where he started his musical career as a bassist at the age of 16. A while later he started a course in painting which he aborted shortly before graduating to go on tour with his band. This success of the tour led to his decision to go to Los Angeles. Here he recorded several EPs and two studio albums - "Footprints" and "The Linger Kiss". After various visits ...

Thomas Hinterberger is a solo ballet dancer at the Opera National Du Rhin (ONDR) in Mulhouse, France. He got his diploma in ballet dancing from the Academy For Dance and Music in Munich, Germany, in 2001 and he holds a professorship in classic dance and music since 2018. Born in 1980 in Munich (Germany), he trained as a dancer at the Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung in Munich with Konstanze Vernon, Hans-Joachim Mets and Alexander Prokofiev. From 1999 to 2001, he participated in productions with the Bayerisch...

Today we are going on the road with an old acquaintance and Yellow Van veteran: musician and filmmaker Jim Kroft, one of my greatest friends and record-holder in consecutive days spent in Fonsi with me. His documentary film “A Conversation With America” is available for free on YouTube right now. It was filmed 4 years ago in the three months leading up to the election. He travelled all across the United States, looking to understand the growing political divide by searching out conversations wit...

Amjad Ramadan was born in Homs, Syria, in 1995. He left Syria due to the civil war and fled to Turkey in 2012 at the age of 17. He lived in Kastamonou for 4 years where he enrolled at the local university to study journalism. Due to Amjad's financial decline, he had to withdraw before any of the courses had even started and without his curiosity having been quenched. He decided to go to Europe for a better future perspective and arrived on the Greek island of Lesvos in 2016. Amjad's arrival coin...

Engeli Haupt was born in South Africa and grew up in the capital Pretoria. She studied linguistics at UNISA, the biggest university of the country, that counts amongst its alumni Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. 16 years ago Engeli moved to Mexico due to her love for the Spanish language and, most of all, due to her adventurous and curious nature. During this time, she has been working in English language teaching in various roles. At the moment she works as a materials writer, i.e. she develops...

In today’s episode I will be speaking to Danny and Laura Seiler, who got stuck in the Moroccan desert during the first lockdown. For two months, they and their two beautiful daughters, lived in an oasis where they were stalked by a scorpion, painted an entire swimming-pool blue, and built their very own pizza oven. They will tell us why hospitality is at its greatest when somebody puts a spade in your hand, how garbage can be an ally in conspiratorial planning, why “Inshallah” is such a life-aff...

Olga Stefatou is a visual artist and curatorial consultant. She recently moved back to her native country Greece after working with Qatar Museums as photography specialist for two years. In her practice, Olga works with mixed media and mainly with photography. She investigates the idea of freedom and its connection to geopolitics, heritage and social structures, with a special interest in gender issues. Believing that image-making should engage the personal and collective consciousness, her work...

Leo is a filmmaker, writer, director, and cameraman from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I had the great pleasure of meeting Leo and his wonderful wife Mabel at the International Film Festival Ierapetra on Crete in 2018 and we got along brilliantly right from the start. Leo was running with his documentary film "Right There", the story of a Rio policeman, who abhors the use of guns and violence in general, traveling to South Africa to understand how a country that had been so deeply divided by Apartheid...

Jim Kroft is one of my dearest friends, and an especially talented one as well. Music, videography, and photography are the fields where he excels the most, but I have a feeling if I were to catch him with a paint brush in his hand, I would be equally awed. In 2015, Jim and I set out in Fonsi to document the European Refugee Trail for a self-funded project. What had been planned to be 3 weeks turned into almost two and a half months on the road. We both felt that human suffering cannot and may n...