It looks like its time to sock it to the former Soviet Union in movies. This is the big subject for the new Kazakhstan cinema and here it's the infamies of the GDR however Bernd Böhlich' s "Und der Zukunft zugewandt / Sealed Lips" is showing us something subtly different from what we've seen before.
We kick off with a ragged prisoner going over the wire in a gulag as searchlights rake the scruffy ground. Guards open fire. Falsh forward and a stern looking Alexandria Maria is dismissing a call from a friend saying she told her so as the Berlin wall comes down. No surprises so far.
However in her 1952 native Germany, an officer in the Ministry of Propoganda and Innovation one of the officers has reviewed her case and realised that a great injustice has been done here and her two women colleagues. Against the advise of his bureaucrat dad he has the trio repatriated ("Pack thirty kilos and leave your work clothes") and brought back. Turns out she was one of a 1930's group of leftist artists who Stalin put in front of a firing squad.
They ut her fevered daughter into a children's ward and appoint her to a new People's Theatre with a backcloth of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on the stage and put her to mounting a children's drama on the theme of the Collectivization Conference Ulbrecht is hosting. The only condition is that the women sign a statement that they have been off working in Russia because this is not the moment to admit Russian courts hand down the wrong judgement.
Things are going nicely for Lara. Her daughter is in school while Lara makes it with the Pediatrician. However Stalin dies at the point where one of the survivor women gets into a half bottle of rough red and blabs to the doctor. He queries the matter with the bureaucrat who accuses Lara of breaking her signed agreement. She packs the kid off to her own mother in the country who only half knows the truth ("Do they have no stamps in Russia") before the man in the long over coat flashes his badge and our heroine finds her self in a cell where she can't lie down or sit on the bed before nightfall.
The doctor goes off and takes over the Hamburg practice his dad (Hark Bohm with one scene) is closing thus losing his services to the Socialist state.
This is one where even the people with decent instincts are twisted into infamy by the system.
Nice touches like the portrait painter describing doing Brecht, who got bored posing, only to be told that's the way people feel at his plays. Straight forward effective film making from a mainly TV director brings a feeling of conviction to material which has shading and motivation to the heavies while not diminishing their misdeeds.
This one should have wide showing.
We kick off with a ragged prisoner going over the wire in a gulag as searchlights rake the scruffy ground. Guards open fire. Falsh forward and a stern looking Alexandria Maria is dismissing a call from a friend saying she told her so as the Berlin wall comes down. No surprises so far.
However in her 1952 native Germany, an officer in the Ministry of Propoganda and Innovation one of the officers has reviewed her case and realised that a great injustice has been done here and her two women colleagues. Against the advise of his bureaucrat dad he has the trio repatriated ("Pack thirty kilos and leave your work clothes") and brought back. Turns out she was one of a 1930's group of leftist artists who Stalin put in front of a firing squad.
They ut her fevered daughter into a children's ward and appoint her to a new People's Theatre with a backcloth of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on the stage and put her to mounting a children's drama on the theme of the Collectivization Conference Ulbrecht is hosting. The only condition is that the women sign a statement that they have been off working in Russia because this is not the moment to admit Russian courts hand down the wrong judgement.
Things are going nicely for Lara. Her daughter is in school while Lara makes it with the Pediatrician. However Stalin dies at the point where one of the survivor women gets into a half bottle of rough red and blabs to the doctor. He queries the matter with the bureaucrat who accuses Lara of breaking her signed agreement. She packs the kid off to her own mother in the country who only half knows the truth ("Do they have no stamps in Russia") before the man in the long over coat flashes his badge and our heroine finds her self in a cell where she can't lie down or sit on the bed before nightfall.
The doctor goes off and takes over the Hamburg practice his dad (Hark Bohm with one scene) is closing thus losing his services to the Socialist state.
This is one where even the people with decent instincts are twisted into infamy by the system.
Nice touches like the portrait painter describing doing Brecht, who got bored posing, only to be told that's the way people feel at his plays. Straight forward effective film making from a mainly TV director brings a feeling of conviction to material which has shading and motivation to the heavies while not diminishing their misdeeds.
This one should have wide showing.