
Out in East Berlin
By Jochen Hick, Andreas Strohfeldt
2013 | 94 min | Documentary
In the documentary, which was successfully screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, gays and lesbians from the former GDR have their say.


By Jochen Hick, Andreas Strohfeldt
2013 | 94 min | Documentary
In the documentary, which was successfully screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, gays and lesbians from the former GDR have their say.

2016 | 90 min | Documentary
Young, gay, and conservative, Mario Roellig is a witnesses to the atrocities committed in the GDR. He guides groups through the Stasi prison where he was once incarcerated. A love affair with a politician from West-Berlin made him try to flee to the West, but he got unlucky and was detained at the famous Stasi prison Berlin Hohenschoenhausen. Today Roellig confronts GDR aficionados and is also confronted by people who still believe in social utopias. And he tries to overcome his hurt feelings: ...

2006 | 5 min | Queer
Award-winning director Jochen Hick humorous doc HALLELUJAH! follows the Pope's visit to Cologne 2005 and juxtaposes two camps of demonstrators. Award-winning director Jochen Hick follows humorous doc HALLELUJAH! follows the Pope's visit to Cologne 2005 and juxtapostions two camps of demonstrators: Christians on the one hand, and gays and lesbians on the other. Direct Cinema in short form.

2009 | 3 min | Shorts
Filmmaker Juliane Henrich explores the term "Wende" (course change) by means of a speech by Christa Wolf, which she gave shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. A time-lapse recording of the Berlin television tower is intertwined with fragments of Wolf's speech on 04.11.1989. The writer called into question the term "Wende", which today is synonymous with the peaceful revolution of 1989, but it was actually SED Secretary General Egon Krenz who first spoke of a ...

2011 | 30 min | Documentary
Arrested, interrogated, persecuted, suppressed. At the Hohenschönhausen Memorial in Berlin, eyewitnesses recall the Stasi methods used during arrest. All of them remain traumatized. Their accusations are directed at the former SED regime. Conversely, former Stasi employees deny that any injustice occurred. In the film, both sides confront each other. A battle for the interpretation of the past begins. Personal memories, however, show that history has many facets. But it is the dialogue between victims ...

2009 | 64 min | Documentary
This ambitious directorial debut chronicles lesbian lifestyles and social networking in Vienna in the 1950s and 60s. In those years, Vienna was a drab and traditional place. The scene - if it existed at all - was male- oriented, and the few bars where women did meet were not particularly inviting. Lesbian life was characterized by invisibility and, if anything, was criminalized. Three eyewitnesses of that era talk in an eloquently and refreshingly (self-)ironic way about what it was like to feel ...

2006 | 22 min | Icons & Media Art
In 1984, the artists Lutz Dammbeck, Günter Firit, Hans Hendrik Grimmling, Frieder Heinze, Günter Huniat and Olaf Wegewitz occupied a trade fair building in the center of Leipzig to stage one of the first independent and public exhibitions in the GDR – the 1st LEIPZIGER HERBSTSALON. The event was an act of resistance against the GDR's system of state control and a creative form of self-assertion. The artists defied the restrictive guidelines of cultural policy and created an autonomous space for avant-garde, ...

2012 | 26 min | Drama
At the centre of this film is a young transperson, his question about his own identity and his desire to belong - even if you deviate slightly from the norm. Alicia (Ekaterina Tafel) is 15 years old and lives at a group home for youth with special needs. She wants to become a singer and longs for recognition. One day, a new teen, Mika, is seated at the dinner table. Alicia notices that this boy not only pays attention to her, but is also somehow different. A flirtation begins, but when Alicia walks ...

2017 | 98 min | Documentary
The newest addition to Jochen Hick's Berlin trilogy about gay life in Germany's capital city - with many current political references. The film explores the roots and the fascination of a city that is still a dream destination and refuge for many gay men from all over the world. Jochen Hick interviews local luminaries such as Romy Haag, Rosa von Praunheim, Ades Zabel and Udo Walz. He and they talk their lives and the struggles they've endured. From the Homosexual Action West Berlin (HAW) to the ...

1999 | 93 min | Drama
Walter is a man in his late 50s for whom reality is somehow slipping away. In GDR times he was the director of an industrial collective, but now his life's work is a ghostly ruin. Walter is stunned by a world that has discarded him - and an inner rampage has begun. With Hilmar Thate as Walter, Cornelia Schmaus as Sylvia, Henriette Heinze as Gina, and Dirk Borchardt as Rene. "Andreas Kleinert's calm yet powerful cinematography portrays not only the lack of perspective and stagnation of the dismantled ...

1988 | 42 min | Icons & Media Art
Three artists who moved from East Germany to West Berlin in the mid-1980s are the focus of this documentary. Cornelia Schleime, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling and Hans Scheib were part of the alternative art scene in East Germany and resisted state dictates. But what did the change to a new social system mean for their artistic identity? How did their strategies and perspectives change in the West, where market mechanisms and a different culture of self-staging suddenly prevailed? In THE PAINTER CAME FROM ...