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

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

Grand Central Station, New York - the town's landmark. The camera captures impressions within 24 hours.

Only two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in January 1990, almost two hundred controversial East German visual and performance artists—including Jürgen Böttcher, the Autoperforation Artists, AG Geige, Via Lewandowsky, Trak Wendisch, Conny Hege, Klaus Killisch, Helga Paris and Hanns Schimansky—presented works rarely shown in the GDR at the exhibition space in the former La Villette slaughterhouses on the outskirts of Paris.

Basing his work on documentary material, Andrew Thorndike tells the life story of Wilhelm Pieck: from young worker to fighter for the German working class, and from enemy of national-socialism to the first president of the German Democratic Republic.

Portrait of 80 year old Gustav J., born in Lithuania, who became a blacksmith and whose paths of life led him to East Prussia, Russia and finally to Germany.

Agricultural scientist and mother Isolde struggles with the dicrepancies between her personal convictions and the political realities in East Germany.

Spring 1988: a cinematic chronicle of the small town of Zehdenick an der Havel in the Mark Brandenburg. Brickworks have determined the rhythm of life in Zehdenick for exactly 100 years. Seasoned brickmakers and young skilled workers speak frankly and critically about their working and living conditions and their futile efforts to improve them. The film is the first part of the Märkische Trilogie, which Volker Koepp shot "over the course of time about a brickworks in the small town of Zehdenick in the Mark Brandenburg. The very sensitively and atmospherically designed film was withheld by the GDR censors of the time. A depressing report about outdated production methods and disillusioned people."

Homelessness in New York. Interviews with those affected. An architect from San Francisco comes up with the idea of building the so-called "City Sleeper" - a housing container. Couldn't the City Sleeper also be used for the homeless of the Federal Republic of Germany?

The story of communist Walter Zauner who in 1952 was one of the first in the Federal Republic to be convicted of sabotage of a military installation.

In early summer 1989, Helke Misselwitz portrays young musicians in a band who produce their music on other people’s waste items. The four boys call themselves "Bulk Rubbish" and they drum out their resentment, having grown up on the new housing estates of East Berlin. A straight-up picture of the GDR youth is presented here, which in no way conforms to the official image. The film crew concentrates on the observation of the boy Enrico and his mother Erika: when the mother marries in the West, her son decides to stay in East Berlin, bidding her farewell at the border-crossing. Only shortly after, the tables are turned again: as the events in Berlin leading up to the fall of the Wall are practically captured live from the film crew, Enrico insists on maintaining his cultural identity, even after the fall of the Wall. The "Bulk Rubbish" musicians want to remain citizens of their own state and perceive the looming reunification with scepticism.

An interview with Madame Buchela, a West German clairvoyant.

Documentary on Bernd Köhlert, a West German mercenary whose death in the Congo caused a sensation

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.

An international anthology about the struggles of female workers around the world.

In a reception camp for ethnic Germans in Eisenach, the director gets to know the girl Doris S. who went to West Germany and came back. This film interview tells the story of her individual fate in a divided Germany.

Protests in Hasselbach in the Hunsrück Mountains against the deployment of 96 Cruise Missiles.

The film deals with the infamous "Kommando 52", which was active in the 1960s civil war in the Congo and was recruited mainly from West German men. Among them is the former Wehrmacht officer Siegfried Müller. Based on personal accounts and original material - backed by tape recordings of interviewed mercenaries and photos of murdered Africans - it creates a hard hitting historical document.

Volker Koepp documents life in the Dorotheenstadt in Berlin-Mitte, which was called "Feuerland" in the 19th century.

Part 3 of the Wittstock series also shows the surroundings of the textile factory. Older gentlemen in a pub reveal that two factories produced fabrics for the military here during the Second World War. In 1945, only a handful of handlooms remained. The contemporary witness does not say why. It was probably too sensitive to reveal the reason on camera in 1978: The Soviet occupying power dismantled many production facilities in the GDR after the end of the war and transported them to the home of the victorious Red Army.