DEFA Film Library to Host 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 an East German 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 of the Berlin Wall.

Accompanying the photos are texts, written by the director and translated by Savannah Champion, a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s German and 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 Institute: Authority and Alterity in East German Movies: Political Experiments, Rebel Youth and Civil Unrest.