Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

17-year-old Ramona comes from a home in Berlin to a small village and introduces herself as the baker's daughter. Neither of them knew anything about each other. Laconic images of the dreariness of the East German provinces show the excessive demands on the long-married baker and the mutual speechlessness of daughter and father.

Young man follows his sister everywhere with video camera and microphone and also accompanies her when she contact with men.

The director describes the everyday life of a little boy who, as a "latchkey kid," has to spend the afternoon alone until his father finally comes home in the evening. The mother, for whom the boy makes a letter the following day, seems to have left the family.

Paul Celan’s poem echoes. A drive reveals a long-abandoned Gründerzeit villa in ruin. Inside, a woman in elegant WWI attire dances, then slumps in mourning. After the war she cleans, reappears in 1930s riding clothes amid radio discontent as a maid and housekeeper move through the halls. Mourning returns with WWII’s end. Post-war, she dances to American rhythms, breastfeeds under Soviet-occupation broadcasts. Beatles and Pink Floyd play as a woman in overalls emerges, memories of the century flooding her mind. She climbs into a Trabant Kübel, helmet beside her, determined to give the villa a new life.

Short film about foreign affairs

The film documents the hard work in the Frank-Behrendt coal business.

A railway line is to be laid through remote Lusatian farmland. Surveyors herald the “new era” with their work. The events also leave their mark on the people. Stylistically idiosyncratic first feature film by a director who comes from documentary film. The story is told as a parable about the relationship between humans and progress, with the actors making extremely clever use of their freedom.

The film revolves around two characters: a high school student who is intelligent, beautiful, and fulfills all the expectations placed on her by her school, her parents, and society—and a young unskilled worker, a loser, whom she is supposed to take care of and reform. Such sponsorships were commonplace in the GDR and form the basis for a multi-layered, ironic, and profoundly told encounter that deals with conformity and rebellion, social background, and outsiders.

Sibylle Schönemann’s film about abortion lets young and older women speak; women who were forced to abort by their partners or who chose to carry the baby to term despite predicted difficulties. Assembled as a kind of collage, a round table alternates with stylised passages, while the camera also shows moments in a clinic right before and after the procedure. The attitude vacillates between drama and affirmation of life. Liberal perspectives, with one exception, are left out. Schönemann, together with Tamara Trampe, almost managed to take up the complex issue in a feature film.

A little everyday story about a man, his wife, her father, an old friend, and a few scenes from the unspectacular lives of ordinary people. Shot in a Berlin apartment with its authentic interior, the cinematic chamber play comically tells the story of the end of a marriage.

A satire about a West Berlin commercial producer with an East German background. To stave off his company’s bankruptcy and collect a second round of Western aid money, he “repeats” his flight from East Berlin – on, of all days, November 9, 1989.

A portrait of a 74-year-old woman who lives in modest circumstances in a village in Brandenburg and tells her story on camera: born in 1904 in Rastenburg (East Prussia), Wolters Trude moves to Berlin at an early age with her parents and five siblings. At the age of nine, after the death of her mother, she was placed in an orphanage. In 1918, at the age of 14, she was placed with a family, working in their restaurant. She married in 1929; her husband turned out to be an alcoholic; she had eight children, six of whom survived, and whom she raised practically on her own.

Short biographical documentary about the life of Alfred Florstedt and his life as a progressive communist from the Weimar Republic to his death in 1985.

Student film depicting recess at a grade school.

A wounded Soviet soldier is kept hidden by his wife in their home for 26 months. He hopes to survive the war in this way. Too late, they both realize the error of their ways.

The everyday work and life perspectives of a family of farmers from Brandenburg.

A documentary portrait of the everyday life of teenagers in Mecklenburg.