Socialist Women’s Images – The Female GDR

The experienced amateur filmmaker Liselotte Schließer looks back on her career and wonders at the low number of female directors and camera people.

A Soviet dance instructor is expected to ensure the authenticity of the choreography of a children’s and youth dance ensemble’s Eastern European and Central Asian folk dances.

Technically elaborate and sensitively composed, the self-taught nature filmmaker Ingeborg Tölke unlocks fantastic and cruel aspects of the natural landscape of a moor.

The self-taught nature filmmaker Ingeborg Tölke inspired broad audiences with her technical skills and her lifelong connection to flora and fauna.

An entertaining vision for International Women’s Day as an admonition, inspiration and commentary about gender relations in GDR everyday life, in the form of a puppet animation.

According to the film’s voice-over, it is the duty of a factory’s women’s committee to “exert a constant influence on systematic ideological-political and technical qualification”.

Mother, working woman, housewife and wife all in one: A tightly scheduled everyday life seems to leave next to no space for developing one’s personality beyond these roles.

Environmental protection was firmly anchored in the legislation of the industrial state of the GDR. The tension between exploitation and preservation of nature, however, seemed unresolvable.