The film crew talks with Palestinian families who have been driven from their homeland after the UN petition for the division of Palestine and the founding of the State of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948. Many Nakba survivors ended up in Lebanese refugee camps, including Bayt al-Sumud, Bourj al-Barajneh and Rashidiyyeh, where they have lived for over three decades under the harshest conditions.

The short is dedicated to the Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR and their fate after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When the contract between the governments of Vietnam and the GDR was canceled, the workers became unemployed and were sent home. The film is one of the rare testimonies of the time that examines everyday racism before and after the Wall collapsed. 

Licensor: Angelika Nguyen

Filmed using an old hand-cranked Parvo L camera and radical montage strategies, this short is an experimental and alternative portrait of Karl Marx’s family and their poor living conditions during their long years in London. Original personal texts by the philosopher and his wife combine with historical photographs overlaying images of an abandoned East Berlin building. This short was produced to celebrate Marx’s 100th birthday in 1983, but officials did not find it worthy. It was released only five years later. Part of DEFA Kinobox 1988/61.

A woman born in 1949, the year the GDR was founded, talks about her life based on 35 images in her family album that each represent one year. This short was to premiere on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of East Germany. Officials rejected the short, however, as an ostensibly negative portrait of GDR family life presented by an atypical woman. It was released under a different title a year later. Part of DEFA Kinobox 1985/39.

A brief history of the emergence and artistic innovations of tango in 19th-century Argentina and Europe. The film offers a mosaic of tango melodies, art works, dance performances, historical footage, photographs of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century and texts by Celedonio Flores and Enrique Santos Discépolo. Part of DEFA Kinobox 1985/40.

Painter and performance artist Cornelia Schleime’s Draped in White, based on her performance series (1982-84), is a surreal reference to both a bridal veil and the bandaged, cloaked and wrapped female body. The motifs of immobility and imprisonment are references to the political situation in East Germany.

Schleime, a strong feminist voice in the East German underground art scene, moved to West Berlin in 1984.

Available on the DVD Counter Images: GDR Underground Films, 1983-1989.

This instructional film was produced by the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) and used for training new Stasi employees or informants about detailed surveillance that could lead up to an arrest of GDR citizens.

In this short, East German photographer Gundula Schulze (b. 1954) vividly explains her creative process and talks about her desire to and concerns about capturing the whole personality of the women in her work. She sees her nude portraits, posed in social settings, as the antithesis of the usual, superficially erotic nude photographs. As of the late 1970s, Schulze’s innovative photo series were met with official disapproval because they captured and conveyed the loneliness, poverty and distress felt by some in East German society.

Starting in 1975, Lutz Dammbeck worked as a freelance artist for the state-owned East German DEFA Studios. By 1986, when he left the GDR for West Germany, he had directed a total of six shorts for DEFA. These groundbreaking animation films differed in style and content from the studios’ other animation productions; controversial at the time, they are now part of international animation history. This streaming playlist includes the six DEFA animation films:

This documentary communicates the importance of Thomas Müntzer for East Germany in the late 1980s. The film crew visited important sites to convey the life of the powerfully eloquent theologian and radical preacher of the Reformation, who became the leader of the Peasants’ Uprising. This documentary covers the central events in Thomas Müntzer’s life, from his birth in Stolberg, Thuringia in 1489, to his execution in 1525.  

This documentary profiles four members of parliament: mining foreman Adolf Kriesche, farmer Susanne Häber, arc welder Andreas Uhlig, and former East Berlin mayor Herbert Fechner. Although balancing their full-time jobs with their civil service can be a challenge, each of them has specific reasons that inspired them to become part of the People's Chamber.

After being destroyed twice, Dresden's Semperoper is now being carefully rebuilt for a third time, with the surviving wall and ceiling ornamentation and the decorative paintings by Ferdinand Keller serving as stylistic models. The documentary reports on construction progress and techniques. Footage of the opera before it was bombed in WWII is contrasted with scenes from performances after the reopening in 1985.