Varieté Utopolis – oder einige Meter Autobahn(2024)

The sun shines over the city squares, but many remain unkissed. Here, everyday life is barren and precarious - economic wealth elsewhere. The film embarks on a journey to 16 disadvantaged neighborhoods in Germany and visits projects that use artistic and cultural interventions to combat deprivation. With music, theater and intercultural dialogues to create strong neighborhoods. What can subsidized socioculture and performative-artistic practice achieve in cities characterized by high rents and dwindling public infrastructure? Where are these humane counterpoints able to transcend the endured, less and less scandalized social poverty and concrete normality in the direction of social diversity and the opening up of new scope? Art and culture as an extinguishing fire department in social hotspots or as active solidarity for the utopia of the polis.