Letztes Jahr - Titanic

Voigt and crew travel Leipzig from December to December in '89 to '90. Except for about 20 seconds at the beginning and end of a train pulling into and out of the station, it's just a collection of DDR citizens talking about life, about the consequences of Reunification and their plans.

It's a good document of emotions at the time. The crew shares some intimate moments with several people, and they actually get a chance to say some relevant things. From a technical view, it's quite good - the audio and picture are just fine. We don't hear much, in America anyway, about honest film projects from the DDR.

It's really quite drab, with no narrator or background knowledge. The street scenes and events are surely familiar to people who were there at the time, but it was difficult to follow who everyone was and why they were being interviewed. Although what they have to say is interesting, I'm usually left wondering who they are.

There's also no real statement from the interviewer/filmmaker about his own thoughts, save from the few simple questions he posits to the people he interviews. There's no statement on the power of protest to change governments, the rightness (or wrongness) of coercive governments. There's no narrator and no explanation of where one is or what is going on. I'd normally like this minimal approach, but here I found it cheap to possibly lazy.

If you want to know about the DDR, I'd start with other films/documentaries/diaries. This is interesting, but there isn't much substance to it.