Catalog Search Results
1) Solo sunny
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
This smash hit, which captures the East German 70's style in its gritty-glitzy visuals and its catchy soundtrack, is ranked by film critics among the 100 most significant German films of all time. Sunny (Renate Krössner, Go for Zucker), an aspiring singer, longs for fulfillment and to be recognized as someone special. She gets kicked out of her band, but starts over in the "underground" scene of East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg. Based on a true story,...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
The rabbit is me was intended to encourage discussion of the democratization of East German society. A sardonic portrayal of the GDR's judicial system, the film was condemned as an anti-socialist, pessimistic and revisionist attack on the state. Its name was eventually adopted to signify all the banned films of 1965-66, which became known as the "Rabbit Films. "A young student has an affair with a judge. She learns that he once sentenced her brother...
3) Coming Out
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
Although he has a girlfriend who is expecting his child, Philipp, a young teacher in Berlin, meets Matthias and falls in love. After years of repressing his homosexuality, he must finally accept himself for who he truly is. The first and only DEFA feature film about homosexuality, Coming Out premiered on November 9, 1989 ... the evening the Berlin Wall came down. Philipp and Tanja teach at the same school. Both enjoy their work immensely, win their...
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
Deutsch
Description
In September 1963, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, published its "Youth Communiqué." This document mandated that young people should no longer be passive recipients of education, but should be cultivated as independently thinking and acting individuals. Thus the concept "Leaders of Tomorrow" emerged. At the same time, DEFA introduced a series of feature films that portrayed the everyday...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
Foreman Balla is the self-proclaimed king of a massive construction site. His co-workers stick close to him, like musketeers, as long as he makes sure they are paid. But things stop running smoothly when materials get scarce and two newcomers arrive on the site: Kati, a young engineer, and Werner Horrath, the new Party Secretary. Balla's swaggering, reminiscent of Hollywood gunslingers, melts away as he realizes he is in love with Kati. Arguably the...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
The engineer Linda falls in love with not with one, but two of the men on her construction team, in a film that raises questions about the importance of work, love and happiness in socialist East Germany of the 1970s. When Iris Gusner, one of very few East German female directors, previewed the rough-cut of her debut film, she was accused of presenting an "unrealistic picture of life," and officials banned the film. It did not become widely available...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
Disenchanted and bitterly resentful, the historian Dr. Dallow has been released after 21 months in prison for playing piano in a subversive student cabaret. He refuses the Stasi's offer to help him get his university position back in exchange for becoming an informant. He lives in increasing isolation and despair as he tries to deal with the hypocritical social system and the injustice done to him. Things change after Soviet tanks roll into Prague...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
Stationed in a secluded Bulgarian village in 1943, Walter, an artist and sergeant in the Wehrmacht, lives an almost idyllic life far away from the war. Then one day a transit camp is set up for Jews arriving from Greece. Ruth, one of the Greek Jews, asks Walter to help a pregnant woman in the camp. At first he refuses, but then changes his mind and sends a doctor into the camp ... Stars, based on scriptwriter Angel Wagenstein's personal experiences...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Da-Da-R is a wordplay on the irreverent Dada art movement of the 1920s and the German acronym for East Germany -- the DDR. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for people outside. As they perform their...
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
Deutsch
Description
A socialist story of "atoms for peace" and compulsory labor in an East German uranium mine under Soviet control. Banned at Soviet insistence, it impresses even today with its political complexity, variety of characters and realistic portrayal of daily work in a forbidden zone of the industrial landscape. Sun seekers was banned in 1958 at the urging of the USSR, in part because it is about Soviet-German relations and the mining of uranium to support...
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