The Irrational Remains
2005 | 94 min | Documentary
16 years after their failed escape from the GDR, three people meet again. Are they still friends?
Thorsten Trimpop
DirectorThorsten Trimpop is a German filmmaker known for his work as a director and cinematographer. He has worked on a variety of documentaries and films, including "Farewell to Europe" and "Hunting for Hedonia." Trimpop is recognized for his visually striking storytelling and has received critical acclaim for his cinematography. While specific awards may not be readily available, his contributions to the world of cinema have left a lasting impact on audiences and critics alike.
Films
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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: ...
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 ...
Mit dem Wort Wende
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 ...
Paths in the Night
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 ...
The painter of the strange country …
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Borders
2008 | 20 min | Shorts
In this award-winning newcomer film, a woman returns to her hometown in the former GDR, from where she fled with her family and is overcome by dark visions of a haunting past. Christine Wernke's graduation film from the International Film School Cologne received the Young Talent Award at the Grenzland Filmtage Selb and was shown at the Karlovy Vary Fresh Film Festival. Dana returns to her hometown at the Baltic Sea. Twenty years ago, she and her family feld East Germany by boat. The escape failed ...
GDR Experimental: First Leipzig Autumn Salon
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, ...