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.

A locomotive journey traversing the North to the South of the German Democratic Republic on the eve of its dissolution. Labourers, punks, mothers, intellectuals, young and old are implored to reflect on their life choices, the sacrifices they've made, and their place in the world. Despite everything, hope persists.

The desperate private war of a Vietnam veteran of the US Army. The Film explores the biggest amok run in the history of the USA at that point of time. The story of a mass murder in San Diego on July 18 1984 is told by showing reports of a local TV station. It turns out that the amok was partly caused by traumatic experiences during the Vietnam War.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A brief history of the emergence and artistic innovations of tango in 19th-century Argentina and Europe. The film offers a mosaic of tango melodies, art works, dance performances, historical footage, photographs of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century, and texts by Celedonio Flores and Enrique Santos Discépolo.

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".

GDR anti-Vietnam propaganda film with footage of East Germans donating blood to be sent to the Viet Cong soldiers.

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

Documentary film about the Spanish Civil War.

The Belgian documentarian Frans Buyens interviewed passers-by in East Berlin and Dresden, factory workers and technical draftswomen at the Warnow shipyard in Stralsund, small business owners in Chemnitz, LPG farmers in the countryside, foreign students at the Gottfried Herder Institute in Leipzig and industrial workers in Magdeburg and Eisenhuettenstadt. "The GDR seen through the eyes of a foreigner" was the original title of the film. A few years after the Wall was built, Buyens documented the approval, disapproval and fears of the interviewees.

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.

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

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

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.