Logline:
For 10 years Tippi wandered the Namibian bush dressed only in a loincloth befriending the ferocious animals and the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Tippi now lives in Paris. She returns to her childhood. She is a bridge between two cultures. We will show Tippi in her current life situation, as a teenager in Paris, her surrounding, her dreams and visions, her return to Africa and her meeting new and old friends – i.e. the African elephant and the Bushmen.

Background Story:
In 1990, Tippi Degré – daughter of Alain Degré and Sylvie Robert, a couple who chose to relinquish their lives in France for the freedom of nature in Southern Africa – was born in the newly independent Namibia. Her parents worked as freelance wildlife photographers and film makers. At 10 months the toddler was exploring the Namibian bush and desert.
For 10 years, Tippi wandered the bush bare footed, making friends with all sorts of animals: leopards, caracals, mongooses, baboons and snakes.
Her playground was the hills and the harsh desert tribe lands of southern Africa; as the family wandered the bush land, Tippi picked up all kinds of friends – like Abu, a five ton (28-year-old) elephant she calls “her brother”.
She would ride to a water hole on top of Abu and splash with the elephants of the herd, cuddle giant bullfrogs, lion cubs or meerkats; and became a grasshopper hunting specialist with the chameleons she was so fond of.
Tippi also befriended the Himba tribes people and the Bushmen of the Kalahari, who taught her how to survive on roots and berries and hence gave her practical experience of real life in the bush.
Life as a bush baby came to an end after her last year of "freedom" in Madagascar when Tippi moved to the French capital with her mother six years ago. But both in fact and in her heart, she remained an African.
In “Tippi – Bridging the Gap to Africa” we are focusing on Tippi reconnecting with her childhood memories, getting back to her roots,
re-discovering Africa – now that she is a 16 year old girl living in Paris.

Francisco Franco is the most important and
most controversial figure in the emergence of modern Spain.
How did Franco rise to power and what use did he make of it?
The film examines the formative influences on Franco. The film traces his vision for Spain and his success or failure at realizing it.

In December 2003, Spain marked the 25th anniversary of democratic transition. The 20 November 2005 was the 30th anniversary of General Francisco Franco’s death.
The time is ripe for a fresh overview of the personality of Franco.
The Caudillo has remained an enigma for many. Our documentary is an attempt to observe him more accurately and in more detail than ever before. Unlike many reportages and documentaries on Franco, our film will not be solely a history of twentieth-century Spain but an analysis of the various aspects of Franco’s reign as well as a study of the man.
Franco’s legacy had been an unprecedented era of peace and order, undergirded by his authoritarian grip on the country. While forced political stability enabled Spain to share in the remarkable period of economic development experienced by Europe in the 1960s, it suppressed, but did not eliminate, longstanding sources of conflict in Spanish society. The economic and social transformation that Spain experienced in the last decades of Francoist rule complicated these tensions, which were exacerbated as the regime drew to a close. At the time of Franco’s death, change appeared inevitable. The form that the change would take and the extent to which it could be controlled were less certain.

The general died after having ruled with a strong hand in an authoritarian dictatorship that had begun in 1939. Surprisingly, Franco’s death marked the start or acceleration of the process of democratization that managed in only a few years to completely tear down a regime created after the victory of the Nationals in the Civil War.
The Spanish people managed to find compromise following a Civil War during which both parties inflicted high levels of damage upon the other. Indeed, after Franco’s death, instead of dwelling on the past, the Spanish opted to dedicate themselves to the salvation of their collective future.

Franco, who had spent his childhood during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century and who thought of himself as a military officer in every conceivable respect, thought the Spanish to be a society prone to anarchy, chaos, and violence — all factors resulting in poverty, which, in his mind, demanded their reigning in through a short and taut leash. Yet, following his death, the moderate, pacifist and tolerant nature of Spanish society was allowed to flourish.
This lucid account provides an excellent introduction to Franco’s rise to power and his four decades as autocratic head of state in Spain.
We seek the answer to Franco’s enduring career in the social, economic and political evolution of twentieth-century Spain, and in the personal characteristics which enabled the General to take advantage of those circumstances.

Our film documentary will examine Franco’s formative influences, and the use he made of power once he had achieved it.

Born into one of the most affluent and powerful families of Pakistan, raised with an awareness of her status and position, educated in western elite universities Benazir Bhutto was elected as the first woman to be head of government of an Islamic country in 1988. But while her development seems continuous and consequent, her life was fraught with problems and shaped by tragic. Only after her father, the former head of state Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed by the military ruler General Zia ul-Haq in April 1979, she decided to run herself for government in her home country Pakistan. She managed to succeed twice and now she is trying for a third time.

Philip Selkirk’s documentary traces the biography of Benazir Bhutto and depicts the permanent feud of the “daughter of power” with the powerful establishment of her own country. In Selkirk’s film, Benazir Bhutto describes her route to the head of her country, she speaks about the humiliations and persecutions that she and her family had to suffer under the rule of Zia ul-Haq as well as under today’s military regime of General Pervez Musharraf and she gives us a nightmarish impression about the many years of military rule in Pakistan.

In a frank interview, the director Philip Selkirk manages to speak to the former premier also about her misjudgements, her failures, the accusations of corruption against her and her husband and about the fact that many experts of the country have been calling her ‘The Mother of the Taliban’. Other interviewees in the film are people whose lives were in one way or the other influenced by Bhutto, such as friends, advisors and former officers of the secret services as well as people like followers and opponents.

With the help of rarely seen footage from the film archive of the Pakistan People’s Party, Philip Selkirk manages to document the fascinating history of Benazir Bhutto without gap from her childhood to the present.

Mille Miglia – a charge of more than a thousand miles. That’s what it was like on Italian roads until 1957. Racing cars challenged each other for 1600 kilometres from Brescia to Rome and back. The new edition of the probably most famous road race in the world fascinates more and more participants and spectators.

When the starting signal goes off in Brescia and the mobile rarities follow the “freccia rossa”, the red arrow, thousands of Mille Miglia fans bate their breath. The mix is almost the same as during the original race between 1927 and 1957: fascinating cars, a bewitching landscape, interesting personalities steering their cars and enthusiastic spectators watching and enjoying en route.

The official film, produced in cooperation with Dott. Costantino Franchi, the co-founder of the new edition of the Mille Miglia, will recount the beginnings of the race as well as tell and show us about the Mille Miglia of today.

Prominent contemporary witnesses such as Juan Fangio II, Jacky Ickx, Peter Kaus, Jochen Mass, Sir Stirling Moss, HRH Prince Leopold of Bavaria and Flaminio Valseriati will speak to us.

Castro is one of the last dinosaurs of Socialism: for more than half a century the former Jesuit scholar rules over the Caribbean island Cuba - and would, if nature would permit, go on doing so forever.

What kind of person is this who fascinates the masses and has his enemies punished drastically and sometimes even executed callously? How did he manage to stay in power for so long? How can the modern Cuba be described - as a Socialist exemplar or as miserable anachronism?

The documentary “Castro” outlines Cuba’s history and Castro’s biography, describes the bloody feud between the „Commandante“ and his archrival in the USA as well as the everyday life of the Cubans. Both supporters and opponents of the Cuban Revolution, members of the Cuban government, farmers, dissidents, Cubans and exiled Cubans speak out and explain their lives so much moulded by Castro.
For the historical sequences, the director found his basic work material in the film archive of the Cuban State Council where every inch of celluloid related to Castro and the island is preserved. Thus it was possible to document the complete history starting with the pre-revolutionary regime under Batista down to the present day.

Philip Selkirk: “In Cuba, independent journalists are being watched and normally don’t get very far with their research. The fact that we had access to the Council’s film archive is a little miracle.”