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Mario, a young philanderer, receives 13 antique chairs in a bad state by inheritance and decides to sell off them to get some money. Afterwards he gets to know that one of them contains documents worth a lot of money. So he begins an adventurous trip to regain possession of the chair. On the way he meets many strange people who would like to help or to swindle him.
Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.
A side table and a chest of drawers (played by actors in ingenious soft-sculpture costumes) indulge in a bit of passive-aggressive furniture moving. Do you know what your household decor is up to when you’re not looking? Another characteristically eccentric bit of humor from Dutch filmmaker Sietske Tjallingii, aka "Miss T."
Filmed in Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon the city’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the mid-1960s. Progress and crisis, labour and capital, material and memory, are reflected through a very intelligent rhyme between image and sound. The touching voice and words of Niemeyer as a call for life, and the beautiful camerawork as a weaving of ghosts in the present landscapes.
"Chair Times" charts a course through an ocean of chairs. In the focus are 125 objects from the Collection of the Vitra Design Museum. Arranged according to their year of production, they illustrate development from 1807 to the very latest designs straight off the 3D printer, forming a timeline to modern seating design. The film features many people whose vocations involve design and who are experts in the field, such as designers Hella Jongerius, Antonio Citterio and Ronan Bouroullec, architects and collectors Arthur Rüegg and Ruggero Tropeano, architect David Chipperfield, Director Emeritus of MAK Vienna/Los Angeles Peter Noever, Mateo Kries, Director of the Vitra Design Museum, Vitra Design Museum curators Amelie Klein, Jochen Eisenbrand and collection curator Serge Mauduit. And your guide through the history of chairs is Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra.
When her country is taken over by socialist revolutionaries, a wealthy woman can't bear to give up all of her wealth and possessions to the new government, so she hides all of her treasures in the 12 chairs of a dining-room set. After her death her nephew finds out what she had done and, since the chairs had been "nationalized" and are now in the possession of a dozen different people, he sets out to track them down and get the treasures he believes rightfully belong to him.
