An ideological and physical barrier fell on 9 November 1989 in Berlin. For 28 years, this 155 km wall divided Germany in two, separating friends and family. The recent discovery of some documents reveals the stories of those who managed to escape to join their loved ones, or simply to regain their freedom. Demonstrating imagination and courage, some dug tunnels to get under the Berlin Wall, others inflated balloons to fly over it, while others disguised themselves with fake uniforms. By combining archives, reconstitution sequences and intrigue scenes, this documentary plunges us into a Berlin that has now disappeared, through the prism of the art of escape under the GDR.
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World War Three
This mock documentary uses archival footage, interviews and reports taken out of context and staged interviews to highlight a possible escalation into a nuclear war. In this feature, tension in East Germany, and an uprising triggered by a visit by Gorbachev sees a successful military coup taking place in the USSR. Western actions against brutal crack-downs on civilians involved increases tension between the sides, finally resulting in nuclear war.
Night Crossing
Two men want to escape from East Germany (under Communist rule) but they will only go if they can take their families with them. Based on a true story.
Rabbit à la Berlin
The untold story about wild rabbits which lived between the Berlin Walls. For 28 years Death Zone was their safest home. Full of grass, no predators, guards protecting them from human disturbance. They were closed but happy. When their population grew up to thousands, guards started to remove them. But rabbits survived and stayed there. Unfortunately one day the wall fell down. Rabbits had to abandon comfortable system. They moved to West Berlin and have been living there in a few colonies since then. They are still learning how to live in the free world, same as we - the citizens of Eastern Europe.
Funeral in Berlin
Colonel Stok, a Soviet intelligence officer responsible for security at the Berlin Wall, appears to want to defect but the evidence is contradictory. Stok wants the British to handle his defection and asks for one of their agents, Harry Palmer, to smuggle him out of East Germany.
The Lives of Others
In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.
The Tunnel
Inspired by true events, Olympic swimmer Harry Melchior defects from East Germany in the 1960s and hatches a daring plot to help his sister and others flee East Berlin through a 145-yard underground tunnel.
Berlin Blues
In October 1989, the part of the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg called SO 36, had been largely shut off by the Wall from the rest of the city for 28 years. A lethargic sub-culture of students, artists, bohemians and barflys had flourished among crumbling buildings. Part of that microcosm is barkeeper Frank, semi-formally called 'Herr Lehmann' by friends and patrons. He hangs out drinking, sports utter disregard for anything beyond SO 36 and lazily pursues an affair with cook Katrin. His lifestyle is gradually disturbed, when his parents show up for a visit, things go awry with Katrin and his best friend Karl starts to act strange. Meanwhile, political turmoil mounts on the other side of the Wall.
Balloon
Two families attempt a daredevil plan to escape the GDR with a homemade hot air balloon, but it crashes just before the border. The Stasi finds traces of this attempt to escape and immediately starts investigations, while the two families are forced to build a new escape balloon. With each passing day the Stasi is closer on their heels – a nerve-wracking race against time begins.
Meier
Meier, a paperhanger in East Berlin, inherits from his father in West Berlin. With this money he wants to fulfil himself the dream of his life: a journey around the world. He buys a forged West German passport and pretends to go on a trip to Bulgaria while he really is off to see the free world. When he wants to return to East Berlin he finds himself in an unbelievable predicament and his double life begins. He can't keep away from his East German friends. As with all the best comedies, the action builds up to an eventual crisis. It's a light comedy, which won several national Film Academy Awards. The film is very political, with lots of political jokes/innuendos which only Germans will understand. One is left feeling what a total obscenity that stupid Wall was, dividing one people for 30 years (1-2 Generations) simply by the coincidence on where you just happen to be in the early morning on the 13th August 1961.
Sputnik
November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. A 10-year-old girl and her friends attempt to use their teleportation device to beam her uncle back to East Germany but instead, as they witness on TV, end up beaming everyone in their town into West Germany! They have to race against time to undo the experiment before the nasty border guards open fire...
Hasselhoff vs. The Berlin Wall
David Hasselhoff, better known for his roles in “Knight Rider” and “Baywatch” released a song titled, “Looking for Freedom” the year before the Berlin Wall came down. He performed it on top of the Berlin Wall to a million people during the biggest New Year's Eve party Germany had ever seen. Twenty five years later, David revisits the now-reunited capital, investigating what is left of the Wall, and explores what it meant in the context of the Cold War dividing Communism in the East from democracy in the West. Along his journey he meets extraordinary people who dreamt of freedom and risked their lives trying to overcome the dreaded Berlin Wall.
The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall
Berlin is a place that is indispensable to the imagination, a city where history ticks all the boxes. The longest of all the helter-skelter rides that Berliners have taken through the playground of history ended in 1989 when the Berlin Wall shattered into a million souvenirs. Hundreds of people, mainly young, were killed there trying to escape to the West. The people who built the Wall thought they were building a brave new socialist world. But their dream turned into a nightmare as over time the Wall poisoned, corrupted and brutalized the little world it encircled. In The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall, the dreams and nightmares come dramatically back to life as the spies, informers, double agents and interrogators of Cold War Berlin weave their nervy spells of double lives and double dealing.
Last Year Titanic
Director Andreas Voigt interviewed people of different ages and social backgrounds about their experiences after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He paints an important picture of this historic period in German history, filled with radical social and economic change and insecurity. Last Year Titanic was shot from December 1989 through December 1990 — the last months of the GDR and the first months in united Germany.
Tunnel to Freedom
13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.
Reunification in the Ice: The Story of the Last GDR Antarctic Explorers
In 1989, thirteen GDR scientists and technicians set off from East Berlin to the Georg Forster research station in the Antarctic. During their expedition the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th. Cut off from the images that go around the world, the men can only experience the historical events passively. When they returned in the spring of 1991, their homeland was a foreign country. The documentary reconstructs the thoughts and feelings of the East German researchers on the basis of eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts, letters, film material, grandiose landscape shots from the location of the action and unique photos to make the consequences of the events tens of thousands of kilometers away on the small GDR expedition in the middle of the eternal ice tangible.
Berlin Tunnel 21
In Berlin in 1961, an American soldier and a German engineer join forces to build a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in order to smuggle out refugees, including the soldier's East German girlfriend.
Escape from East Berlin
East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Schröder and his family dig a tunnel to escape to West Berlin as they struggle to overcome the obstacles blocking their underground path to freedom.
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The Daltons
Unshackle your laughing gas, put your ball and chain away, take a prison break and get ready to escape with the Daltons! The fab four are back! The Daltons will try every trick in the books to get out and then some: a maze of tunnels, explosives, hot air balloons and rain dances, and a whole cast of zany characters to help them get free ... or not! The only thing they don’t try using are their brains! But what they lack in intelligence, they sure make up for in willpower and imagination! The far west has never been crazier!
Hogan's Heroes
Hogan's Heroes is an American television sitcom that ran for 168 episodes from September 17, 1965, to July 4, 1971, on the CBS network. The show was set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. Bob Crane starred as Colonel Robert E. Hogan, coordinating an international crew of Allied prisoners running a Special Operations group from the camp. Werner Klemperer played Colonel Wilhelm Klink, the commandant of the camp, and John Banner was the inept sergeant-of-the-guard, Hans Schultz. The series was popular during its six-season run. In 2013, creators Bernard Fein through his estate and Albert S. Ruddy acquired the sequel and other separate rights to Hogan's Heroes from Mark Cuban through arbitration and a movie based on the show has been planned.
Game, Set, and Match
Focuses on Bernard Samson (Ian Holm), beginning with his search for the "mole" that threatens the Brahms Network in East Germany. Samson is sent to Berlin to bring out a Brahms agent. He is then sent to Mexico to try to persuade a KGB major (Gottfried John) to defect, using his childhood friend Verner Volkmann's wife Zena as bait. After it appears another traitor is working at London Central, Samson himself becomes one of the prime suspects.
Imagination Movers
Imagination Movers is a Live-action Pre-school television series that premiered on September 6, 2008 on Disney Channel. The program was originally part of the Playhouse Disney daily block intended for preschoolers. On February 14, 2011, it was moved to the Disney Junior block, serving as Playhouse Disney's replacement. The Imagination Movers TV series is based on the format and music of the New Orleans based music group Imagination Movers who both act and are co-executive-producers of the show. On May 30, 2011, it was announced that the series will end after the remaining episodes of the third season have aired, though the band itself will continue and is open to doing other projects. On November 28, 2011 the Movers ran an announcement on official Facebook page implying that they have been given the green light to air more new episodes of the show in 2012.
Weissensee
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Escape from Colditz
The best known and most notorious PoW camp in history is Colditz, an 18th century castle in eastern Germany. With its imposing walls, steep cliffs, and rigorous policing, it was seen as the ultimate prison, home to the worst troublemakers from allied PoW camps all over Europe. Using archive material and dramatic reconstruction, and the personal testimony of Colditz veterans, this series documents the creative and often spectacular attempts to go over, under, around or through the walls. A specially commissioned archaeologist, working with the veterans, also uncovers the secret rooms, hidden tunnels and concealed doors that were so important in securing each precious escape from Colditz. At the start of 1942, British prisoners were lagging behind the French and Dutch in terms of "home runs" but the British success rate was about to improve, as they were getting help from a new source.
Legendary Sin Cities
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Die Luftbrücke
A German woman and an American general embark on a turbulent romance amid the Berlin Blockade in 1948.
The Same Sky
Cold War, the seventies. Lars is a Romeo agent from East Germany: he must go to the West side and seduce and spy on Western women who work in government or defense institutions.
Ku'damm 63
The single mother Caterina Schöllack takes over the management of the Galant dance school on Kurfürstendamm ("Ku'damm") in Berlin after the end of the Second World War. The father of their three daughters did not return to the family after the war, he is officially missing.
Divided We Stand
ZERV" tells of the first years after the fall of the Wall, the breaks in life courses, of completely different biographies and of the successful coming together in the common fight against crime, which knows no East and West. ZERV stands for the Central Investigation Office for Government and Association Crime, founded in Berlin in 1991 by decision of the federal government.
Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings
The village Schabbach experiences Germany's triumphs and tragedies from 1989 to 2000.
The Wall
Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.