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Roland Gawlik

Actor

Films

Keep Moving

Keep Moving

By Salar Ghazi

2021 | 139 min | Documentary

Stay or go? In the year before the fall of the Wall, a group of dancers have to decide whether to stay in the GDR or flee to the West.

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The Family

The Family

2014 | 92 min | Documentary

Their relatives were gunned down at the Iron Curtain and they are still experiencing the effects of this trauma today. Four of the survivors relate how this past remains unresolved. A mother, for example, still doesn't know what happened to her son's body; a wife doesn't understand how and why her husband drowned at the border; the son of a Wall victim sees for the first time photographs of his executed father's body in a Stasi file. The statements of the victims are cleverly "set in contrast to ...

Unsere Geschichten

Unsere Geschichten

2020 | 106 min | Documentary

As part of the smartphone video project #unseregeschichten (our stories), the young people were encouraged, under the professional guidance of Stefan Weinert, to develop their own position on the story being told. To do this, they interviewed relatives and acquaintances about their personal stories about the German-German division. The project was initiated by the Grenzlandmuseum Eichsfeld. The project was funded by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship and the Partnership ...

Balkan Melody

Balkan Melody

2012 | 92 min | Documentary

Director Stefan Schwietert (ECHOES FROM HOME, ACCORDION TRIBE) continues his musical world explorations with BALKAN MELODIE, a portrait of music collectors Marcel and Catherine Cellier who who through their own love story, discovered a shared lifelong passion for the music of Eastern Europe. They brought undiscovered sounds from the East to intrigued Western ears. "Thrilling" (Zitty) Over 50 years ago Marcel and Catherine Cellier travelled for the first time behind the Iron Curtain, where they collected ...

Justice 2.0

Justice 2.0

2015 | 49 min | Documentary

This film focuses on the crimes committed along the 'Iron Curtain' on the former Czechoslovakian border. The film also looks at the expulsion of the Turkish-speaking minority from Bulgaria. Weinert focuses entirely on contemporary witnesses, whose moving testimonies he weaves into a complex picture of individual fates, which, when viewed as a whole, reveals the systematic structure of human rights violations in these countries between 1948 and 1989. The documentary was made in collaboration with ...

Sag mir, wo du stehst

Sag mir, wo du stehst

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 ...

Glory to the Queen

Glory to the Queen

2020 | 83 min | Documentary

In the middle of the Cold War, four female Georgian stars revolutionized the male-dominated chess world and became icons of female emancipation. Nona Gaprindashvili, Maia Chiburdanidze, Nana Alexandria and Nana Iosseliani lit up the eyes of almost all chess aficionados. As top players, they dominated the chess scene from the early 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. For thirty consecutive years they brought the world title to Georgia. Nona Gaprindashvili became the ...

The GDR Complex

The GDR Complex

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: ...

Face the Wall

Face the Wall

2009 | 85 min | Documentary

Five people representing the more than 72,000 formerly imprisoned East German state refugees reveal the torture, cruelty, and the violations of human dignity that they endured in their daily lives. They are extraordinarily open about their struggle with the interrogation methods and the appalling conditions of imprisonment. In this sensitive documentary, which focuses closely on the eyewitnesses, the open wounds and psychological injuries that made it impossible to lead a normal, fear-free life ...

Fragile Memory

Fragile Memory

2022 | 85 min | Biography

In an intimate exploration of memory and legacy, young filmmaker Igor Ivanko, embarks on a quest to preserve the history of his grandfather, Leonid Burlaka—a renowned Soviet cinematographer whose life's work is at risk of fading away with his declining health due to Alzheimer's. Burlaka, whose career flourished at the Odessa Film Studio during the '60s, left behind a rich archive of films, homemade videos, letters, and photographs, documenting pivotal moments in Soviet cinema against a backdrop of ...

Duerer’s Heirs

Duerer’s Heirs

1996 | 58 min | Documentary

"It cannot be said more coarsely and more precisely: in the GDR, German painting is more German…" was the opinion of the writer Günter Grass at the beginning of the 1980s. The fall of the Wall in 1989 made it possible to take a closer look at this ‘German’ painting of the faded GDR. At the centre of the film is a group picture. The picture was taken in the early 1960s in Leipzig, a field of experimentation and testing for a 'new German realism' under socialist conditions. What connects the founders ...