Film Screenings / Programs / Series
WENDE FLICKS: LAST FILMS FROM EAST GERMANY
November 1 – November 3
As part of our ongoing GOETHE-INSTITUT NEW YORK PRESENTS screenings, we present this program commemorating the great turning point – the Wende – that took place in Germany 20 years ago, showcasing seven films made by East German filmmakers from 1990-1994.
Organized by the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in collaboration with The Wende Museum in Los Angeles, this series features films that got lost in the midst of social change, many of which were never subtitled or screened outside Germany. WENDE FLICKS brings these films to the international public for the first time. In them, the filmmakers depict radical change and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, with tools they acquired from a long and illustrious filmmaking tradition and from professional training at the East German Academy for Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Most of the WENDE FLICKS titles were made by the last generation of East German filmmakers, many of whom had not been allowed to direct their own films before. Finally given the opportunity to make films with a measure of freedom, their repressed talents exploded in a remarkable flowering of creative energy.
The filmmaker Jörg Foth will be here in person on Monday, November 1 to introduce his film LATEST FROM THE DA-DA-R, as well as MIRACULI by his colleague and friend Ulrich Weiß.
Founded in 1993, the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the only archive and research center outside Europe devoted to a broad spectrum of filmmaking from or related to East Germany. For more info, please visit: www.umass.edu/defa.
The Wende Museum – www.wendemuseum.org – founded in 2002, acquires, preserves, and facilitates access to cultural materials from Cold War-era Eastern Europe for museums and other cultural institutions worldwide.
The screenings are supported by the Medien Bildungsgesellschaft, the DEFA-Stiftung, defa-spektrum, and ANTAEUS Film. Special thanks to Juliane Camfield (Goethe-Institut New York), and Hiltrud Schulz (DEFA Film Library).
