Generation '89 - Growing up in the year of change

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

For three years, filmmaker Marion Kainz followed Johanna, a 13-year-old girl from Berlin, and captured her longing for security and freedom in a documentary about her journey toward an independent life.

Documentary (in colour) about the first youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in East Berlin in 1950.

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.

Legendary drag performer Ocaña in performance with a cardboard Marilyn on the west side of the Berlin Wall.

A documentary about the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall which makes no use of vocal commentary but instead focuses on visual elements. From the Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate, the camera captures the historic events from all sides and different angles: on the one hand there are news reporters and tourists from all over the world taking pictures, children selling pieces of the wall to passers-by, and people celebrating New Year's Eve, on the other we see abandoned subway stations and officials with blank looks on their faces.

Short documentary about artist Keith Haring, detailing his involvement in the New York City graffiti subculture, his opening of the Pop Shop, and the social commentary present in his paintings and drawings.

The 5th anniversary of the inner-German wall to West Germany and West Berlin is on the agenda. The necessity of erecting the border is illustrated by comparing the situation in 1939 and the situation in the summer of 1961 with regard to the "threat of intervention" by the Western powers. Berlin people and GDR border guards are interviewed.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

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.

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.

East German documentary/propaganda film about Berlin Wall border guards

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, bringing the reunification of Germany and an end to the Cold War. This documentary revisits the events surrounding the wall's historic collapse. Interviews with George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl offer insight into political maneuvering while firsthand accounts from Germans provide personal perspectives of this historic event that changed the world forever.

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.

A global television broadcast of the event in which former Pink Floyd leader singer and composer Roger Waters led an all-star cast in a mammoth benefit performance of his acclaimed concept album, The Wall. Set in Berlin, Germany less than a year after the destruction of the hated Berlin Wall, Waters was accompanied by disparate talents such as Cyndi Lauper, James Galway, Joni Mitchell and Albert Finney in the classic dark musical tale of a rock star's descent into madness and back.

“Liberty Train – Bürger’s Long Journey” sheds light on the events of the PEACEFUL REVOLUTION of 1989 from different perspectives. It centres on the eyewitnesses who, together with thousands of other people who had fled East Germany, were in the garden of the West German Embassy in Prague on the evening of the 30 September 1989.

Rock and roll's part in bringing down the Berlin Wall and smashing the Iron Curtain is told from the perspective of rockers who played at the time, on both sides of the Wall, and from survivors of the communist regimes who recall the lifeline that rock music provided them.

In February 1986 they received the call of a fatherland that no longer exists: four young GDR citizens on the verge of adulthood see themselves forced, like so many others in East and West Germany, to do their one and a half years of military service. What is special: Their service area is the border system, an anti-imperialist protective wall according to their superiors, death strips and prison bars for a population incapacitated in naked reality. Now, seventeen years later, there is a reunion with the comrades and the old post. This feature film, which was the first in reunified Germany to deal with the inner workings of the GDR border troops, tells of life on the fence, the associated contradictions and some hot phases in the Cold War.