West

classified 15 S
Film

Please note: This was screened in June 2015

Director
Christian Schwochow
Cast
Jördis Triebel, Tristan Göbel, Alexander Scheer
Details
102 mins, Subtitled, 2013, Germany

A woman and her son escape from East Germany to the other side of the Berlin wall only to be faced with an increasing paranoia and her past catching up with her in this suspenseful and stylish Cold War drama.

East Germany, late 70's. Three years after her boyfriend Wassilij's apparent death, Nelly (Jördis Triebel) decides to flee from behind the Berlin Wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic memories and past behind. Under the ruse that she intends to marry a West German man, who takes both Nelly and her son over the border, her only shelter is the first place of refuge for emigrants from the East, an Emergency Refugee Centre in West Berlin. Before Nelly can be processed and given West German citizenship, she must first prove her loyalty to the West. And in this camp, loyalty to the West means giving up the secrets of the East - even if you don't have any. But when the Allied Secret Service begin to question her about her former boyfriend's mysterious disappearance, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.

Covering some of the same terrain as Christian Petzold's Barbara (an audience fave at Watershed a couple of years back) albeit this time focusing on the bureaucracy faced on the other side of the Wall; this is a realistic drama of both style and substance about a woman trying to deal with the humiliation of a system that she hoped would set her free.


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