Virtual Summer Gallery

From June 13 to July 22 the DEFA Film Library will present a Summer Gallery on @defafilmlibraryamherst. This third virtual exhibit on Instagram will take a look at THE MAKING OF Bernd Sahling’s Film It’ll Be OK (1987-90), which documents the unique perspective of a punk who experiences two political systems in East and West Germany.

Director Sahling selected the 74 photos to be displayed in the virtual gallery‘s 13 installments. They are among the countless striking black-and-white photographs he took with his Praktica SLR camera (with 35 and 50 mm lenses) before and while shooting the documentary. They portray the East German punk scene, while presenting the radical changes that took place before and after the fall oft he Berlin Wall.

Accompanying the photos are texts, written by the director and translated by Savannah Champion, a graduate student in UMass‘s German & Scandinavian Studies Program and the DEFA Film Library’s social media assistant. It’ll Be OK will be released later this year, in HD on @kanopy. This release continues the DEFA Film Library’s efforts to make more films on East German youth available for research and teaching, as well as the theme of its 2021 Summer Film Institut: AUTHORITY & ALTERITY IN EAST GERMAN MOVIES: Political Experiments, Rebel Youth and Civil Unrest.