DEFA-Studio für Dokumentarfilme

Leipzig is in a period of change. The uproar of Autumn ’89 is followed by a hectic electoral campaign in Spring ’90. Nightly conversations with street sweepers are dominated by hopelessness and broken self-confidence, but one can also recognise a keen sense for the change in social climate following the political unification in the GDR. Despite their lack of illusions, they have an acute view of their surroundings, and for these street sweepers only one certainty prevails: there will always be dirt.

Martin Brandt (1903-1989), an unforgettable Jewish actor and former member of the Jewish Kulturbund Theater in Berlin, recites from Macbeth and Nathan the Wise, the play that opened the theater in October 1933. These last filmic images of Brandt are combined with historic footage and traces of the Jewish past in Berlin.

Portrait of Hans Globke, jurist at the ministry of interior during the Third Reich and co-author of an official commentary to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Nazi Racial Legislation. While Adenauer appointed him Secretary of State in 1953, he was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in absentia by a GDR court in 1963.

Two narrators read the letters of unknown people and tell about the fate of individuals, their work, love and life.

Hosted by futurist moderator Chris Wallasch, this playful documentary speculates on what love and relationships might look like in the year 2002. Through interviews with travelers at Berlin-Schönefeld Airport and a collage of witty flashbacks and imagined flashforwards, the film reflects on enduring questions of romance, family, and changing social norms.

Sitting at her typewriter, listening to tango music, she dreams. Buenos Aires and Montevideo are far away, a different world where, long ago, the tango came into being. A dream about dance and music, as well as about unfulfilled desire and wanderlust behind the Berlin Wall.

In two chapters the film shows men in divided Germany willing to leave their country. In the first chapter, East-Germans are shown who leave their wives and children behind in order to live in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the second chapter, unmarried West-Germans try to move to the German Democratic Republic.

A documentary about the village Kienitz at the river Oder, about the people, their life, their history.

The compilation film looks back on four decades of East German film production to mark the 40th anniversary of DEFA. Beginning with the founding event of DEFA on May 17, 1946, it continues with film clips from many test recordings of the first feature films after licensing. Well-known directors, screenwriters, actors and musicians accompany the historical newsreel and feature film excerpts and thus bear witness to the reconstruction work in the early post-war years. A documentary that reflects the diversity of DEFA productions in the film and newsreel sector.

A short biography of Arnold Zweig, through the lens of East Germany state media.

A documentary about young people just starting their higher education and their professional life.

Documentary about the sisters Lene and Berta who live in a village in Thuringia.

Documentary film about the Spanish Civil War.

This documentary reports on the master potter Otto Engelmann from Klingmühl, who was commissioned to make black painted clay heads of Karl Marx in the spring of 1973. Engelmann briefly explains the individual work steps from mixing the casting slip to firing the clay heads and then painting them. An old craft is vividly captured on camera and accompanied by original sou

A polemical report. "Way to the neighbors" is the motto of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. In their "Remarks on the Oberhausen 66 Film Festival," the GDR documentarians Gerhard Scheumann and Walter Heynowski take the competition selection to task: They see formal experiments as "excesses on the big screen" and instead of political themes, they discover a "surge of perversity." After her own film "Kommando 52" was rejected by the festival, a criminal complaint by the GDR lawyer Friedrich-Karl Kaul against the mercenary and commander "Kongo-Müller" is the focus of a press conference. The refusal of a cinema owner to show the film was a "hint from the neighbors", the neighboring public order office, and therefore state censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany.

A film about Jewish cemeteries in East Berlin, based on a screenplay by Günter Kunert, with text by Rabbi Martin Riesenburger. There are shots of gravestones and inscriptions – deported, murdered, perished; in Auschwitz or Theresienstadt. Commentary reminds us of the victims – "in 1933, 160,564 Jewish citizens lived in Berlin; in 1945, 3,500".

A feuilletonistic conversation with the movie audience about the question: How do you feel about going to the movies? In general - and especially in summer? What do people expect from movies these days and what criticism do they have on their minds? The interviewees are vacationers of all ages and tastes. The occasion and background for this not entirely serious survey is the 1965 Summer Film Festival, which is captured in a cheerful reportage style. Interviews with actors on the festive opening evening and climax of the film confirm that there is only a relative cinema fatigue. It depends on the quality of the film on offer.

The epilogue to the film "The Laughing Man" (1966), which alternates between objectivity and anger, exposes the involvement of the West German mercenary Siegfried Müller in the war against the Congolese government Lumumba. In the sequel, new witnesses against Major Müller have their say, including a former school friend and a French paratrooper colonel. GDR lawyer Kaul reports on the status of the criminal proceedings against Müller, while the final images show the war criminal feeding the ducks in South Africa.

A woman born in 1949, the year the GDR was founded, talks about her life based on 35 images in her family album that each represent one year. This short was to premiere on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of East Germany. Officials rejected it, however, as an ostensibly negative portrait of GDR family life presented by an atypical woman. It was released under a different title a year later.

Leontes, king of Sicily, tries to convince his friend Polyxenes, king of Bohemia, to stay longer as his guest. But only Hermione, Leontes' wife, can talk Polyxenes into not leaving. Leontes gets suspicious. Is his wife having an affair with his friend? Leontes tries to find out about it...