Chilean Memories & GDR Film

Two US Premieres! In collaboration with Claudia Sandberg (Univ. of Melbourne), the DEFA Film Library and German & Scandinavian Studies at UMass Amherst will present a program on Chilean Memories & GDR Film at the 2017 GSA conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, the DEFA Studios made a wide range of films focusing on the social and political situation in Pinochet’s Chile, as Chilean artists and intellectuals fleeing the regime settled in the GDR.

• On 10/5/17, we premiered one of these films as part of GSA Arts Night.  Isabel on the Stairs (1983, dir. Hannelore Unterberg), is about a twelve-year-old Chilean girl and her mother in East Berlin, awaiting news of their father and husband.
• On 10/7/17, Claudia Sandberg presented Hidden Films: A Journey from Exile to Memory; this 2016 German/Argentinian co-production, which she co-directed with Alejandro Areal Vélez, charts the legacy of DEFA’s Chile films as sites of shared German-Chilean audiovisual heritage and cultural memory.