“Won’t make it today, hope you don’t mind.” A casual call, the husband will be late again, not to be expected before eight. He is an officer in the National People’s Army, still young, but with a lot of postings under his belt, always accompanied by his wife. She has resigned herself to her fate, while he flourishes enviably in his profession. Róża Berger-Fiedler spends most of the time by his side, following him in brisk cuts from appointment to appointment. Talking is required and demanded constantly: to representatives of the Soviet armed forces, young recruits, subordinates. Words come easy to him, but not everything runs smoothly.

The core of this most personal of the Thorndikes’ projects are Annelie’s diary entries: Her story is to be the starting point for a kind of all-German ‘Heimatfilm’ that praises the utopian power of the GDR and sharply condemns Federal German wrongs, but finds transcendent beauty on both sides of the wall. Over the course of production, however, the visionary dimension of the project was progressively trimmed down, though it’s still tangible everywhere in the compromised final version: The intensity of its pathos is both oppressive and enchanting; some historical simplifications and ideological twists and bends may be hair-raising, but they still achieve the desired effect.

Accompanying Liselotte Schließer, who worked full time as a technical draughtswoman, in her private and professional daily life. She talks about the passion that became her second mission in life. The only woman in organised amateur filmmaking for many years and now head of the amateur filmmakers’ association of Radebeul, she still misses female directors and camera people.