and we visit a company that's made shoes out of coffee fish and now. we begin a tribe like a film festival in new york for showing cutting edge independent films they just tell the world premiere of x y chelsea a documentary about whistleblower and activist chelsea manning the director tim travers hawkins got incredibly close to the complex character the walls u.s. soldier bradley manning who leaked a huge amount of classified documents to wiki leaks was sent to jail and there started transitioning to a woman quite a story. what story this. question. not i

thought. i did not laugh while. i'm out of bed go to hear. oh. there was this endless stream of violence and death and destruction. life peoples and sales to. take out all these documents and. after one. manning stood up most of american soldiers would have sailed in harm's way and if you could be free. and watch you know when

you might. want to might not want. these rumors. and i think i should transgender i'm the same person as i was just last seven years on. how different. industry and our. life is in the beginning. and i still have battles with the highway traffic for a big surprise the political well this week by announcing she was running for the u.s. senate told me. they are and i heard it here and i can't stop are you know how fragile she is. in her side of her state of uncertainty witnessed a lot. i'm not a person people think. looks intriguing market group is here to talk about this. she says i'm not the person people think but she does put herself in the public

spotlight regular intervals i mean so who is chelsea manning well as you already such she is a very complex character and the documentary follows her after her release from prison and twenty seventeen and until then we didn't know much about her as a person but tim trevor hawkins the director was able to get really really close and so we get an impression of this young woman who was once a soldier and then the whistleblower and a double agent as some say the film shows that she very often doesn't quite know how to position herself in public and personally i can't get enough of this picture i'm really endlessly curious because the film shows how she is really and on the other hand she's so incredibly strong because we all know what she went through. now her transition from man's woman was difficult for some people to accept so do

you think it actually undermined her credibility maybe it did for some people because she said that she struggles from a very early age with a gender identity and then she found her way to accepting herself as a trans woman in a military prison so it's really hard to understand for some people and then compared to what snowden on julian assange she was not this kind of hero my guess so when we remember until the rape charges that were made against and after his dramatic arrest he was really a bit of a superstar in certain circles as the man who took on the most powerful country in the world but. oh chelsea manning did that to. what was the reaction to the film there were mixed critiques but try back at so it was quite sad actually because the main protagonist couldn't even be there. in chelsea manning is currently back to

prison because she is refusing once again to testify to a grand jury against wiki leaks and her lawyers who have barry worried about her she's a lot in the rubble but well she still sticks to her guns well it's going to be a lot of sort of attention for this film because of judy in a song being released just about it but i think salute like the crew thanks very much. now with all the talk in recent times of looted african art here in europe that needs to be returned to its rightful owners it's nice to see museums in your cooperation with african museums for an exhibition of african art in germany the southern german city of tubingen has an exhibition featuring congolese art from the nine hundred sixty s. to the present day. designer shoes and the clothes to go with them but this too is africa as reflected by

artists from the democratic republic of congo. and they portray people whose outfits bring color to daily life and allow them to dream of escaping poverty to a life of luxury. the fighting in the streets of the capital kinshasa people who see no escape from the violence here flee the country like the father of video artist michelle my game with her installation she dives into her past when she was six years old her family emigrated to france. my father it was really and engage you know in the context took critics and even to to coming. up you know to try to change something you know in congo so it was put it over features and when i was younger i asked myself ok what we're going to do and i choose art because i mean as an

artist we have. to tell things to our position to try to change the world. when mobutu sese seko was in power the democratic republic of congo was still called zaire the president's grandiose self promotion couldn't hide the human rights abuses and hunger problems the poverty stricken country still struggles with today as always it's the powerful who earn profits in congo and these days it's not just europeans but also the chinese exploiting the country's natural resources during the colonial era it was belgium. so belgian slack to take pride in infrastructure that ability to. as a matter of fact the whaleboat. basically to export natural resources and so this is something which. continues with chinese for instance who

also like the belgians and previously only the colonial period invest heavily in setting up this kind of infrastructure but again with the same purpose how can anyone escape from this trap is there a way out. these artists look for answers in khartoum like works the dream of prosperity is reachable for only a few people in congo women are often the victims of violence with few opportunities for self advancement in this male dominated society. game and now lives in paris and she's already had an impact with her art. when i started out as a woman. i was. the one only woman now. woman you know the young generation they make this choice not is a choice they made to become women artists and i think.

she certainly did now there's a company in munich which specializes in creating shoes from sustainable materials it's a family that has been making shoes for over one hundred sixty years and that too is the latest innovative brand that too has made shoes out of mushrooms or milk and sneakers from bubble wrap or other minium and now with the help of a bird in company they're making sneakers out of star. these shoes are made with stone it's flexible slate which is used here for parts typically made from letter. they're from the sustainable luxury brand to from munich sebastiaan teases the footwear brands founder his family has been in the shoe business for six generations but even for him working with stone soup. is one of them it's hundreds of millions of years old all natural and each pair is

unique. technically speaking it isn't superior to leather because some of the shoes are a bit less robust so you shouldn't wear them in siberia at minus forty degrees celsius but they're perfect for normal day to day purposes. the process of making stone flexible enough for shoe making starts with huge blocks of marble or slate using a special technique very thin slabs or sawn off which are then glued onto a flexible material. the method was invented by berlin based company rockslide which collaborates with sebastien teams. picks to be the finest ice man i feel this stone becomes flexible if you make it very very thin we're talking less than one millimeter thick and then combine it with something stabilizing the. the stone is then exposed to heat and cold alternately to make it even more flexible but that process is a trade secret by the end it can even be stitched. along with shoes there are

also stone belts sunglasses and backs but there are limits to the usability. when it comes to stone t. shirts jackets and such it gets complicated we've experimented with those kinds of items but other materials offer different breathability and range of motion under them but it's also going to stay expensive and labor intense so it will probably stay more niche than mass market. sebastiaan tes had been looking for an issue again and again he tested on usual materials for she like leather made from tender fungus a treat parasite. strong from the very a in austria. but also coffee. milk. good. fish scale have all been tested as potential sneaker material. it

seems sebastiaan t. smokey walking the innovative line in his shoes for me woodstock. good luck to him unfortunately those sneakers are expensive but working toward sustainability is worth it so we have to start looking after all planet where all not out i leave you but i forget our web site for more on all those topics d.w. dot com slash culture thanks for watching.

for. reliable. news distance for classic status. of the. automotive history books. a small town in thuringia with a huge cultural legacy. climate. sound fine man has managed time and again to attract pioneers and trailblazers joined us to discover the town's cultural grids and its contemporary art six.

minutes on w. . no cause for celebration world press freedom day on d w. it's all happening to children coming. during link to news from africa and the world. your link to an assumption stories and discussions continue and we'll come to deduce after getting program tonight from born in germany from many years of easy now i would say d w it comes to africa come

join us on facebook at g.w. africa. i'm not laughing at the job well i just sometimes i am but i said nothing which at that point the german thinks deep into the german culture of looking at the stereotypes of the question that is think the future of the country that i don't. need to change but the biggest drama there to me it's all about a new time a job join me to make the german fun d.w. . post. cyclon fani has hit india's eastern coastline with winds gusting it's more than two hundred kilometers per hour it's one of the biggest storms to hit the region in decades and has claimed several lives millions of people have been evacuated from coastal areas of india and bangladesh meteorologists say the cycle.