The Red Elvis

A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.

2007-02-13 | de

Ich will da sein - Jenny Gröllmann

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

2008-06-19 | de

Time Loops - A Conversation with Christa Wolf

Journalist Daniela Dahn interviews the East-German author Christa Wolf during the German reunification: reflections on history, changing politics, life and work.

1991-01-02 | de

Heimatkunde

Former "Titanic" satire magazine editor Martin Sonneborn takes an undercover trip around Berlin and discovers the East-German mentality and what is left of the socialist German Democratic Republic.

2008-10-01 | de

Last to Know

In the documentary Last To Know political prisoners, sent to jail for openly opposing the East German regime that existed until the German reunification in 1990, talk about their times of trial and their lives today. Neither they, nor their families have come to terms with what happened.

2006-02-11 | de

Our Children

From an official perspective, marginal youth culture did not exist in East Germany. The topic of subcultures was taboo in the GDR, and groups such as goths, skinheads, anti-skins, punks and neo-Nazis were dismissed as social deviations promoted by western countries. Director Roland Steiner had access to such young East Germans in the late 1980s. Over the course of four years, he brought them before the camera in an attempt to understand what drew them to these groups.

1989-11-30 | de

I Am My Own Woman

The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.

1992-10-30 | de

DDR - die entsorgte Republik

2019-10-02 | de

Freundschaft! - Die freie deutsche Jugend

2008-06-22 | de

Generation '89 - Growing up in the year of change

The documentary tells the story of the reunification from the perspective of six teenagers from East Germany.

2015-02-12 | en

Stasi auf dem Schulhof

At the end of the GDR existence, around 8,000 children and young people were so-called "unofficial employees" of the State Security. They were approached and recruited in youth clubs, churches and schools. They were assumed to spy on their friends or report on their parents.

2012-01-05 | de

Stasi, un État contre son peuple

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.

2021-10-03 | fr

Codename Pirate

Was my father really a spy, as his file in the former East German Secret Service (STASI) suggests? This question marks the starting point of a son’s journey into his late father’s past which still remains somewhat mysterious even today. Eric Asch is looking for answers – in the Stasi archives, at the NSA and in his own family history. The result is a very personal documentary which reports ironically about the practices of secret service during the Cold War.

2014-04-15 | de

Sportsfreund Lötzsch

2008-07-17 | de

Geheimsache Mauer - Die Geschichte einer deutschen Grenze

Germany in the summer of 1961 - the "Iron Curtain" divides the country. Only in Berlin is the border still permeable. West Berlin is the open wound of the GDR. Until August 13, 1961, a summer Sunday that would divide the world into a before and an after. 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the day on which the division of Berlin cemented the division of Germany and Europe for more than two and a half decades. The docu-drama "Geheimsache Mauer - Die Geschichte einer deutschen Grenze" by Christoph Weinert and Jürgen Ast tells the story of the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border from a new, unusual perspective: from the point of view of those who planned, built and guarded it. The film takes the viewer behind the scenes of the Wall builders: it reveals the "concreted" thinking and calculating calculations of the Wall strategists - and their secret plans to perfect the deadly border further and further.

2011-07-29 | de

Cell 364

While Germany sits as one of the major democratic models, an ex-prisoner of the Stasi delivers from his former cell a frightening testimony that questions the sustainability of our contemporary democracies.

2020-07-21 | de

DDR: Der Aufstand vom 17. Juni 1953

"GDR The uprising of June 17, 1953" - : Since its founding, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has repeatedly struggled with domestic political problems. While the standard of living of the population in the western part of Germany steadily increased, it stagnated in the GDR . A one-sided, industry-oriented reconstruction policy, coupled with rapid militarization, weighed on the country's economy, which was already under pressure from Soviet reparations demands. A majority of the population did not identify with the socialist system, which accordingly stood on shaky ground.

1990-10-07 | de

Der Sturz - Honeckers Ende

Erich Honecker ruled the GDR for 18 years. His fall in 1989 heralded the downfall of the state that had called itself "the better Germany" for 40 years. Nazi victim and autocrat, bourgeois and power-conscious: Honecker was an ideological hardliner who coordinated the construction of the Wall in 1961 and whose regime was known as an unjust state for Wall deaths, firing orders, the Stasi and forced adoptions. In the wake of the fall of communism, the former model socialist fell into homelessness and found himself on the run in his own country. Suffering from cancer, he managed to evade responsibility before a court by emigrating to Chile, where he died in 1994. This gripping documentary portrays the rise and fall of this contradictory German politician with an impressive array of top-class international and national contemporary witnesses. Erich Honecker would have been 100 years old on August 25, 2012.

2012-04-02 | de

Erich Mielke - Master of Fear

Docudrama about life, career and breakdown of Erich Mielke, the former Security chief of East Germany.

2015-11-05 | de

This Ain't California

A retrospective look at the youth cultures born in the German Democratic Republic. A celebration of the lust for life, a contemporary trip into the world of skate, a tale on three heroes and their boards, from their childhood in the seventies, through their teenage rebellion in the eighties and the summer of 1989, when their life changed forever, to 2011.

2012-08-15 | de