Can school be exciting and even fun? The integrative pre-vocational August Sander school in Berlin-Friedrichshain at least seems the perfect place for this. The noise of the cars of the big city can be heard from the distance, birds are singing on the lush green grounds. Lessons here include horticulture, agriculture and animal care. And when you watch the students weed garden plots and feed rabbits, things look extremely enviable at first glance. But of course, even in this paradisiacal place there are conflicts, annoying teachers and the anxious question: What comes after graduation?
This documentary follows the school life of a group of pupils with different learning disorders and other impairments over one school year. At its focus are young people who are on the way from training to work, from childhood to adulthood, and struggle to find their place in the narrow regulatory system of school and in society.

This film about children in Eisenhüttenstadt, that showcase project of socialist urban development, was planned in 1981 and terminated “for reasons of state discipline” before it began. Ten years later, its protagonists are already in the West or no longer alive, Thomas Heise sweeps up the remains. Very little material, but memories. Neil Young’s ballads accompany car and train rides through the new non-places of the German East: “Gone, gone, the damage done.” From there, “Iron Age” delves into old and new conflicts – baffled parents, escapes from reality, the wish to think for oneself and not be thought. Odds and ends. A DEFA production, placed with Norddeutscher Rundfunk by Klaus Wildenhahn and awarded the Sponsoring Prize at DOK Leipzig.