Berlin is losing its publicly-funded Nextbike system. What does it say about the city’s deflating civic status? Also we meet the artistic director of the Doxumentale film festival to hear why they’ve added an X to their name. And the founder of Give Something Back to Berlin will tell us about how beauty parlours are places of feminist empowerment. 

Nextbike has lost its €1.5M annual public funding to run a discounted shared bicycle system across Berlin. The CDU-led city-state government says it is too broke to fund the scheme, which ran since 2017, and reached 4 million journeys last year. Joel explains what’s behind its demise.

Days before the start of Berlin’s Dokumentale documentary and non-fiction festival, the organizers received a legal threat over their name. Instead of fighting, they’ve changed their name to DoXumentale. We meet the festival’s artistic director Anna Ramskloger-Witt, who explains why the new name is better. She tells us about program, including a nature film about gay animals, a profile of a Berlin undertaker and more. DoXumentale runs until June 28. Find a screening or watch online at https://www.dokumentale.de/

What goes on behind the doors of beauty salons? NGO founder Annamaria Olsson decided to take a microphone to meet women in these safe spaces, and found a world of womens’ empowerment. Beauty salons give women jobs and help them overcome domestic violence. Annamaria has travelled to Morocco, Georgia, Bosnia and Kosovo to record audio for her project. The result is “Stories from the Beauty Parlor”. Listen now here: https://www.beautyparlorstories.org/

Radio Spaetkauf co-founder Joel Dullroy is briefly back in Berlin, after one of his trips around the world filming mini-documentaries. If you want to see some of his videos, go to: http://www.joeldullroy.com

Thanks to Vanta for support! http://www.vanta.com/RadioSpaetkauf

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Live show recording and engineering: podfestberlin.com 

This episode was produced by Daniel Stern and Joel Dullroy. Find Dan at: https://www.instagram.com/danielandstern/ or https://www.sterndaniel.com/