2007
A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.
2010
In the summer of 1989 tens of thousands of tourists from communist East Germany came to Hungary. They were deeply disillusioned because they felt they had no future in East Germany. There was no freedom, no choice in the shops, salaries were low and they could not travel except to Eastern Europe. They wanted to go to a prosperous and free West Germany but they could not get passports, so they hoped that by travelling through Hungary, the least suppressed country of the Soviet Block, they could cross the Iron Curtain into Austria and then travel on into West Germany. For them the Hungary of twenty years ago was the new east-west passage. Written by Czes
1992
The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.
1950
Documentary (in colour) about the first youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in East Berlin in 1950.
2023
The destruction of the traditional legal system is probably one of the lesser-known yet essential goals of the Nazi state. The aim was to establish the supremacy of the "people's community" over the individual by subjugating the judicial system. The documentary looks at the careers of four people who were actively involved or became victims.
2019
2008
Former "Titanic" satire magazine editor Martin Sonneborn takes an undercover trip around Berlin and discovers the East-German mentality and what is left of the socialist German Democratic Republic.
2017
Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)
2016
In 2016, DEFA celebrates its 70th anniversary: the film embarks on a journey into the exciting film history of the GDR. In a comprehensive kaleidoscope, the importance of DEFA productions is illuminated, the relevance of the films as propaganda productions for the GDR, which socio-political themes were in the foreground, but also which heroes DEFA brought to the screen and celebrated as people from the people.
1981
In this documentary, Joachim Hellwig uses partly unpublished footage to shed light on a dark chapter of German history and shows the entanglements between the politicians' claims to power and the interests of industry and business in Germany from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War (1914 to 1945). The Nuremberg War Crimes and Industrial Trials served as the basis for this documentary.
2002
Former heads, senior officers and the rector of the MfS law school explain how the ministry functioned. The interviewees see themselves as legitimate actors with a clear mandate and political enemy image. They provide an insight into the techniques and routines of secret service work, psychological tricks during interrogations and the management of “unofficial collaborators”. What they all have in common is that they are not aware of any moral guilt. The directors contrast their footage of prisons and archives with the statements of former Stasi employees in an attempt to expose their evasions and efforts at suppression.
The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.
