Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

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

Gitti lives in Berlin. She's single and decides to put an ad in the personal to find her perfect man. She gets a lot of responses, however she is quite choosy.

Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg: Children are playing and climbing all over the monument to Käthe Kollwitz, frowning adults are watching them. What would Gustav Seitz, the creator of the sculpture, say? Christa Mühl has asked him but reveals his answer only when the adults have finally disappeared. Until then, she constructs explosive matter as light as a feather, set to Belgian cembalo jazz and with the perky montage style that characterises her early documentary work. After Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler himself had the most controversial scene cut, the film could be broadcast on television and triggered a lively discussion about the practical value of art.

Short film about foreign affairs

Student film depicting recess at a grade school.

Student film about hiding Jews during the Second World War.

Short student film about a latchkey child in the GDR.

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

A chronicle of the events in Dresden in the fall of 1989, which began on October 4 with the passage of refugee trains from Prague and the associated riots. Among many others, a doctor who describes the injuries of police officers and demonstrators, young demonstrators who were arrested and a couple whose son disappeared have their say.

It’s only after the separation from her husband that another man tells her how valuable she is: the Chladek family, she’s a teacher, he’s a student. The first few years were nothing but quarrels: the Surau family, he’s a plumber, she’s a postal worker. Should she really intend to get further education at evening school, he won’t accept this: the Lehmann family, he’s a locksmith, she’s a lecturer. Three thirtysomething couples live in the Potsdam high-rise behind whose windows Petra Tschörtner looked for her graduation film. Long interviews that pierce the surface at once, equally revealing and oppressive. Promptly awarded a prize at the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

This portrait shows Black cartoonist Oliver Harrington from New York, who fled to the GDR. For his political drawings, he drew on worldly anecdotes and his love of storytelling. Director Hans Hattop later taught videography at the University of Film and Television.

Rainer Burmeister (director) tells a story about everyday working life of 46 young Mozambican people in the GDR who were employed as contract workers. Among them is 20-year-old Luisa, who worked in the mining industry and, like the others, is now training to be a craftswoman.