Christian Lehmann

Documentary with beautiful black-and-white CinemaScope shots, which combined impressive scenes from a trip to the Ukraine with historical reminiscences. The censors criticized the "too narrow and too intimate view" of the Soviet Union; they didn't like the fact that bells were ringing, that a chauffeur from the film crew or an elderly peasant couple recalled the horrors of war or that Nikolai Gogol and Yevgeny Yevtushenko were quoted - that was considered backward-looking. Without the knowledge of the filmmakers Karlheinz Mund and Christian Lehmann, the film was shortened and mutilated; the seventeen minutes that were allowed for a public screening are only the torso of a large draft.

At the Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost an der Oder, a new blast furnace is being moved to replace a burnt-out one. 2000 tons have to be moved 18 meters: Three times we hear it in the commentary. Master Klaus is now in command. His orders are to be obeyed at all costs. Men at work: tense faces, examining hands, the sound of screeching winds and steel cables stretched to breaking point. Everything is going well, and it is a new best performance: The downtime of the plant has been reduced from 80 to 40 days, the commentary says.

Sketches from a store cashier's everyday life.

A DEFA documentary celebrating the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in East Berlin in the summer of 1973. Blending reportage with staged elements, it presents the festival as a showcase of international solidarity, culture, and socialist ideals.

Tracing biographical lines, Volker Koepp steps into his oeuvre, rich in encounters. Returning to Lithuania, Moldova and Chernivtsi, he looks back and brings things up to date, as the war against Ukraine becomes a determining element of the present. Epic.

This black and white documentary film reports from the Berlin Zoo, located in the Friedrichsfelde district of the Lichtenberg district, was opened in 1955 and is the largest landscape animal garden in Europe with an area of 160 hectares. With shots worth seeing, you can experience the animals in their enclosures and spacious free running areas. The film gets along completely without commentary and directs the concentrated view to hippos, parrots, camels, red deer, bison, llamas, kangaroos, rhinoceroses; lynxes, birds, leopards, tigers, lions, polar bears and crocodiles.

Impressions of a playground in Berlin. It is also the playing field of the elderly chess and card players - counterpoint to the argument of isolation and emptiness in old age.

For the 70th anniversary of Bertolt Brecht’s birth, international Brecht experts, including directors Giorgio Strehler, Benno Besson and Juri Ljubimov, got together for a one-week Brecht Dialog at the Berliner Ensemble on Schiffbauerdamm. Participants discussed the contemporary role of Brecht, nationally and internationally; Brecht’s directorial methods; the collaboration between director and actor; and the theater ensemble’s role in society. Actress and Berliner Ensemble director Helene Weigel gave the final keynote, emphasizing the political role of theater. This short film features scenes from Brecht’s model staging of Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti, played by students at the Schauspielschule Berlin, from the Berliner Ensemble staging of Coriolanus; and from The Exception and the Rule, played by Berlin-based Arab lay actors under the direction of Syrian director Chérif Khaznadar.