Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

Student film about hiding Jews during the Second World War.

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.

Using photos and letters that the director found in a landfill, she reconstructs in her documentary film the life of Maria Bartel, a Berlin baker born in 1902 who, as the director comments in voice-over, "was in the prime of her life during fascism." In 1920, she moved from the East Prussian province to Berlin with her first husband. After his suicide, she opened a bakery, which she ran until the end of the war in 1945, raised her son, and now has various relationships and love affairs.

Student film depicting recess at a grade school.

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.

A Little Boy in the ruins of World War II and the white lie of an old man - after a story by Wolfgang Borchert.

In interviews, several important GDR personalities and also GDR citizens comment on the events of October 1989.

Short film about foreign affairs

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.

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.

Red Berlin from the 1910s to the resistance against National Socialism comes to life as a proletarian family history. The siblings of Ernst Knaack, a communist who was executed in 1944, talk about their childhood and youth, which they spent with their grandparents. Their grandfather, a former sailor who took part in the November Revolution and was a member of the Workers' and Soldiers' Council, ran the Zum Kuli pub in Prenzlauer Berg—a workers' pub that was also frequented by the unemployed and homeless, where party meetings were held and leading KPD members such as August Bebel and Hermann Duncker were regulars.

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.

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.

The minutes before the train departs: time pauses.

Documentary about the Potsdam landscape painter and art teacher Hubert Globisch.

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.

Short documentary