A formally sophisticated and thoughtful film about the “Below Forest Death March” memorial site: In the late spring of 1945, this wooded area near Wittstock became an improvised temporary camp for inmates of the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. They eternalized themselves and their fate by carving on the trees. But what does “eternal” mean? The trees grow, change and renew their skin …
Karola Hattop juxtaposes the many media images of confident working women and the men who support them with a naïve reporter who finds out that in practice equal rights are often quite a different matter. Somewhat pushy, he seeks out women at the hairdresser’s and in the maternity wear department, joins functionaries in their cars, crashes wedding parties and sneaks into museum tours for children. A revelatory curiosity full of the casually captured mundane drabness that was often revealed more clearly in student films than in comparable DEFA productions.
The women’s committees in the GDR factories promote the technical and ideological-political qualification of female staff members. However, the film identifies deficits in the women’s private environment, since the men by their side often support their professional development only to a limited extent and the women’s multiple responsibilities persist despite state support.
“17 June 1990, East Berlin. The GDR will exist for another three months. No more time to commemorate all those who stood up in ’53, showed civil courage and were vanquished. This film is dedicated to them.” This is what we hear from offscreen as the film opens, to images of a rally for the victims of 17 June.
Right after the collapse of the GDR regime, director Andrea Ritterbusch searched the western archives for sources for a reappraisal of the East German uprising of 17 June 1953. She discovered a wealth of valuable original footage which she combined with newly shot interviews with contemporary witnesses of the revolt. In her documentary film she reconstructs the weeks before and after the countrywide unrest, sheds light on propaganda and, with the help of her interview partners, interprets the progress, cause and political contextualisation of the strikes and demonstrations over time. The SED regime was on the brink of collapse during those days and may well have been toppled without the intervention of the Soviet army. This review of an event that was already 37 years in the past when this film was made is true to reality and at the same time testifies to the excitement and reorientation of the East German population in the years of political change.
Coal briquets hit the waggon with a thundering sound, are loaded, unloaded and finally end up in the houses of Prenzlauer Berg. Renate Uhle is the owner of a coal shop run by her family since 1922. Together with her men – Klaus, Kalle, Manne, Erwin, Pummel, Felix and Würstchen – she sees to it that no one in the neighbourhood freezes. Work is hard, the afterwork beer obligatory, and Renate’s tongue quick and sensitive. Helke Misselwitz follows the workers on their chugging diesel-driven ants through the streets and the watershed year of 1989, sweats with them as they climb up endless stairs and listens to them through the cigarette smoke.
On the occasion of the GDR Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment), passed in 1970, the speaker explains the various aspects of environmental protection through vivid, visually pointed examples. The film repeatedly refers to the fundamental contradiction between exploitation and preservation of nature in a developed industrial state but is unable to resolve it.
