Best movies like Die Wahrheit über die Stasi

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.

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.

When a Polish sailor jumps ship in Britain, a couple of local intelligence operatives keep him under surveillance. Soon, he’s recruited to infiltrate a missile installation outside of East Berlin and bring back photos of the new rockets.

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.

Frank, a tenth grade student, falls in love with his classmate Regine. His father is a well-connected plant manager in the GDR; Regine's mother is a single parent with four children. Regine wants to become a kindergarten teacher, but her grades are poor and she is not allowed to apply for technical college. Frank champions her and seeks an open discussion about these rigid regulations. But his criticism is nipped in the bud.

Berlin, 1989. Sascha is a young East German border guard and Franzi is a lively young West German woman who's just moved into a flat next to Sascha's watchtower at the Berlin Wall. It takes only a slight mishap and a selfless act of chivalry and the two fall in love. But soon the Stasi believes they are witnessing the start of a revolt. This is the time of mass protests and East Germans taking refuge in the West German embassy in Prague after all. Franzi and Sascha have to find their ways to stand up for their love and strive for the impossible; to bring down the wall.

The ambitious scientist Franz Walter doesn't hesitate when he is promised a professorship at the university. He immediately accepts, pledges absolute loyalty to the system and agrees to work for the GDR's foreign intelligence service until he can take up his new position. Together with his colleague Dirk, he is sent on foreign assignments to West Germany. Franz soon has to use blackmail to get innocent people to talk. But his superiors go even further: GDR refugees and their relatives are targeted to be psychologically destroyed, forged letters, medical diagnoses, surveillance and wiretapping are on the agenda. However, this is more than Franz can bear: he feels powerless and increasingly isolates himself. When he then decides to steal secret documents for a later defection to the West, this results in an unfortunate chain reaction leading to his arrest and ultimately to his execution...

The real life story of East German singer and writer Gerhard Gundermann and his struggles with music, life as a coal miner and his dealings with the secret police (STASI) of the GDR.

A young orphaned woman, named Kotzebue, is trying to find out who her parents are in the icy landscapes of Alaska. Kotzebue is helped by an east-german librarian, whose husband was killed while fleeing from the GDR. Although both women could not be more different from each other, a fragile relationship forms.

Maja Wegner is in her late thirties and a single mother of a teenage daughter. To give her stale life a new direction, she decides to start all over again in the big city. She sells her house in the countryside, quits her job, and moves with her daughter to Berlin. There, she finds a job as a conductor for the railroad company. Although Maja soon finds new friends in her apartment building, the search for a new life partner does not come off so easily.

A young man from an early age falls in love with a girl whose family is not in good standing with the ruling Communist party. His father however is a member of the "Stasi", the secret state police. The father not only hinders his son's relationship with the girl, but he arranges for his son, after finishing school, to become a Stasi spy himself.

An inspiring, triumphant and wickedly funny portrait of one of comedy’s most enigmatic and important figures, CALL ME LUCKY tells the story of Barry Crimmins, a beer-swilling, politically outspoken and whip-smart comic whose efforts in the 70s and 80s fostered the talents of the next generation of standup comedians. But beneath Crimmins’ gruff, hard-drinking, curmudgeonly persona lay an undercurrent of rage stemming from his long-suppressed and horrific abuse as a child – a rage that eventually found its way out of the comedy clubs and television shows and into the political arena.

A Red Army major caught between East and West Berlin finds his wife gone and somebody else moved into his apartment.

Erich Kasulke and Rudolf Portmann are comedian stars of the former GDR. When the Wall falls, so does their success. Portmann becomes a successful businessman, while Kasulke tries to continue working on the comedy circuit - without success. When his wife also cheats on him, he decides to start a new life in Berlin. There he quickly meets his old friend Portmann, who has built up a huge company. He offers him a job. But Erich puts the entire company in danger...

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.

Thomas Brasch was born as a German-Jewish emigrant in England in order to move to the young GDR with his family at the beginning of the 1950s. His father Horst is primarily interested in helping to build the new German state. But Thomas prefers to realize himself as a writer and in doing so discovers his potential as a poetic rebel. His very first play was banned and soon afterwards he lost his place at the film school. When the tanks of the Soviet Union roll through the Czech capital Prague in 1968, Brasch and his girlfriend Sanda and other students try to call for protest in the streets of Berlin - and fail. His own father betrays him to the Stasi and allows Thomas to go to prison. After being paroled, he continues to try his hand at poet writing about love, revolt and death. In the GDR, however, you don't want to have anything to do with someone like him.

East Berlin, early 1980s: Ludger is hired by the Stasi to spy on the oppositional arts scene in Prenzlauer Berg. But when he falls in love with the mysterious Nathalie, he has to choose between a life as a celebrated underground poet and his career as a Stasi agent. A choice that will turn back on him 30 years later.

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.

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.

Around the festival week for the 675th anniversary of Golzow for GDR television a portrait of the village, its landscape and agriculture in the past and present. In sketches also the parents' generation and the current state of affairs in the lives of some of our "children of Golzow".

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.

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.

"Kruso" tells of the last summer before the Wall came down on the small island of Hiddensee in the Baltic Sea. Beyond state-organized tourism, the isolated island became a kind of artist colony every year and a place of longing for dropouts and alternatives. Due to its proximity to Denmark, Hiddensee was also the starting point for the flight across the Baltic Sea.

Germany 1982: The country is divided into two parts. Nele, coming from West-Germany, travels to East-Germany where she meets Captain, singer of a band. They fall in love with each other, but the regime "takes care" of their relationship, meaning: They can not see each other again. Germany 1990: The country is reunited. Nele starts searching their lost love...

When Martin, a former GDR citizen, is released from jail, he lately becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.

Futuristic view of life in Pankow, East Berlin. What if the reunion never happened? GDR has turned into a madhouse with serious economic problems.

When Dr. Schmith's proposal for international research on infant mortality is rejected, he decides to leave East Germany and strikes a deal with an escape agency that promises him a leading position at a children's hospital in West Germany. But then the decision is reversed: the project is approved and his international colleagues want Dr. Schmith to head the GDR section. Moreover, he falls in love with his new colleague, Katharina. Schmith initially tries to ignore the arrangements he made with the escape agency, but they blackmail him. Things soon turn deadly...

Wolf Brandin is in his mid-twenties and lives with his wife and child in East Berlin at the end of the 1950s. In West Berlin, the student of electrical engineering is recruited by the American secret service CIA. But Brandin immediately notifies the State Security of the German Democratic Republic and from then on lives a dangerous life as a double agent. When Brandin reaches the breaking point, his marriage starts to unravel because Brandin is not allowed to tell his family about his double life.

In the late fifties a large industrial complex was built near Schwedt, in the GDR. This low budget film tells about the voluntary participation of the brigades of the Freie Deutsche Jugend in the building up …

In this vivid historical drama set in 1980s East Germany, two dockworkers and best friends who dream of escaping the repressive regime are forced to choose their loyalties when the state police promise them safe passage out of the country — if they inform on their co-workers and union leader.