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The DEFA Film Library will host German filmmaker and producer Annekatrin Hendel on the UMass Amherst campus for a meeting with undergraduate and graduate students and a screening of her internationally award-winning documentary, “Anderson,” on Tuesday, March 4 at 6:30 p.m. in Integrative Learning Center S350.

The campus and local communities are invited to the meeting and documentary screening, which will also include a post-screening Q&A session with the filmmaker.

Hendel, currently a writer-in-residence at the Deutsches Haus at New York University, has been a close collaborator of the DEFA Film Library since her guest appearance in the Summer Film Institute Authority & Alterity in East German Movies virtual festival in June 2021.

First screened at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival, “Anderson” tells the story of the double life of writer Sascha Anderson, who was a charismatic pop star of East Berlin’s oppositional literary and art underground scene in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg in the 1980s. Anderson was also an informant for the German Democratic Republic (GDR) secret services, the Stasi.

More than 20 years later, the wounds he inflicted upon his former friends and colleagues still run deep. The finely woven web of lies, betrayals and myths he unfurled raise pertinent questions today about loyalty to our communities and friends, appeasement towards an aggressive political system, and personal responsibility and courage.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film, “a real-life spying case among the underground art community in Cold War Berlin.”

UMass Amherst students, faculty and staff can also stream two other Hendel films that are part of DEFA’s holdings, “Beauty & Decay” and “The Brasch Family,” on the streaming service kanopy. 

Hendel’s visit is co-sponsored by the Deutsches Haus at New York University, the DEFA Film Library and the German and Scandinavian studies program at UMass Amherst.