Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

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

17-year-old Ramona comes from a home in Berlin to a small village and introduces herself as the baker's daughter. Neither of them knew anything about each other. Laconic images of the dreariness of the East German provinces show the excessive demands on the long-married baker and the mutual speechlessness of daughter and father.

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

Documentary short about Husemannstraße in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg.

Student film depicting recess at a grade school.

Short student film about a latchkey child in the GDR.

The minutes before the train departs: time pauses.

A documentary portrait of the everyday life of teenagers in Mecklenburg.

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.

A documentary portrait of a Berlin baker's wife Maria Bartel.

The story of Paris-based Palestinian painter Samir Salameh.

Student film about hiding Jews during the Second World War.

Andrees’ graduation project approaches the perky 14-year-old Jacki mainly through her social environment: the stressed patchwork family mother, the solitary long-distance truck driver father, the eclectic neighbourhood. The closer the film gets to its protagonists, the freer the movements of the camera become, gliding through a studio as if in a trance or flying over the nocturnal motorway as if over a UFO landing strip.

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.