The Ministry for State Security - Everyday life at a public authority

The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.

Journalist Daniela Dahn interviews the East-German author Christa Wolf during the German reunification: reflections on history, changing politics, life and work.

A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.

Former "Titanic" satire magazine editor Martin Sonneborn takes an undercover trip around Berlin and discovers the East-German mentality and what is left of the socialist German Democratic Republic.

In the documentary Last To Know political prisoners, sent to jail for openly opposing the East German regime that existed until the German reunification in 1990, talk about their times of trial and their lives today. Neither they, nor their families have come to terms with what happened.

The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.

From an official perspective, marginal youth culture did not exist in East Germany. The topic of subcultures was taboo in the GDR, and groups such as goths, skinheads, anti-skins, punks and neo-Nazis were dismissed as social deviations promoted by western countries. Director Roland Steiner had access to such young East Germans in the late 1980s. Over the course of four years, he brought them before the camera in an attempt to understand what drew them to these groups.

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

Short biographical documentary about the life of Alfred Florstedt and his life as a progressive communist from the Weimar Republic to his death in 1985.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

In the early summer of 1990, the Treuhandanstalt was founded to privatize the "state-owned" companies of the GDR. In the four years that followed, around 4,000 of these companies were closed and around two and a half million jobs were lost. Until its closure at the end of 1994, the Treuhandanstalt incured debts totaling 256 billion marks - the equivalent of around 150 million marks every day. The Treuhand also allowed itself to be cheated out of many billions of marks. This scandal was never fully investigated. Most of the perpetrators went unpunished or were not even charged.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.

With access to recently-opened court files, Julie Etchingham reveals some of the Stasi's UK operations and asks why its other secrets are yet to be revealed.

Germany in the summer of 1961 - the "Iron Curtain" divides the country. Only in Berlin is the border still permeable. West Berlin is the open wound of the GDR. Until August 13, 1961, a summer Sunday that would divide the world into a before and an after. 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the day on which the division of Berlin cemented the division of Germany and Europe for more than two and a half decades. The docu-drama "Geheimsache Mauer - Die Geschichte einer deutschen Grenze" by Christoph Weinert and Jürgen Ast tells the story of the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border from a new, unusual perspective: from the point of view of those who planned, built and guarded it. The film takes the viewer behind the scenes of the Wall builders: it reveals the "concreted" thinking and calculating calculations of the Wall strategists - and their secret plans to perfect the deadly border further and further.

Was my father really a spy, as his file in the former East German Secret Service (STASI) suggests? This question marks the starting point of a son’s journey into his late father’s past which still remains somewhat mysterious even today. Eric Asch is looking for answers – in the Stasi archives, at the NSA and in his own family history. The result is a very personal documentary which reports ironically about the practices of secret service during the Cold War.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

Berlin, summer 1988: While Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd perform in the West, East Berliners can look forward to Bruce Springsteen, Depeche Mode and James Brown. The documentary reveals how the organizers enforced the concerts with the state authorities. On the anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

Click for full movie details & trailers.