That's How DEFA Sounded: Film Music from Babelsberg

Schleimkeim - Otze und die DDR von unten

March 2024 •German

A punk documentary about the life and death of the GDR punk Dieter "Otze" Ehrlich and his band Schleimkeim aus dem Schweinestall. With the fall of the Wall, Otze loses not only his enemy images, but also his life at the price of freedom.

Becoming Black

October 2019 •German

In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin color is merely a coincidence. As a teenager, she accidentally discovers the truth. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Sigrid, an East German woman, fell in love with Lucien from Togo and became pregnant. But she was already married to Armin. The child is Togolese-East German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. In interviews with Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents, striving for normality, developed following her birth. What sounds like fieldwork about social dislocation becomes an autobiographical essay film and a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, viewed from a very personal perspective.

Immer bereit

July 1950 •German

Documentary (in colour) about the first youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in East Berlin in 1950.

Drei Frauen

September 2022 •German

Dance Dance Documentary

February 2004 •English

In 1999, Konami Corp. introduced a Japanese-influenced coin-operated arcade stand-up to the U.S. It's draw was unheard of for a video game: the combination of music, competition, and interactive video-gameplay along with actual physical activity. Four years later, Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) has become one of the most popular game crazes stateside and found easily in video game stores and in nationwide retail markets. This story explores the youth culture surrounding the game and follows a group of devoted players and documents their interactions at various arcades and tournaments.

Pride & Attitude

October 2025 •German

The viewpoints of women from a country that no longer exists preserved on low-band U-matic tape. GDR-FRG. Courageous, self-confident and emancipated: female industry workers talk about gaining autonomy.

Change of Scenery

November 2022 •English

Born in Germany in 2002, Noa Blanche Beschorner evokes the memory of those who, a generation before her, lived through the separation of East and West Germany. Tapetenwechsel (Change of Scenery) is the story of youth seeking their identity when confronting their collective memory.

Zielitz - Der Kampf ums Weiße Gold

June 2020 •German

Lost Places - Schicksalsorte der deutschen Teilung

October 2019 •German

Die Mamais

November 1974 •German

This color documentary tells the story of the "Mamais." In 1960, a group of workers at the Bitterfeld chemical plant set themselves the task of becoming the first "socialist brigade" in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to act in accordance with the slogan "Work, learn, and live socialist."

DDR - die entsorgte Republik

October 2019 •German

Look Out!

November 2003 •German

Hard, harder, hardest! This film orders you from the start to turn up the volume and pay attention. "Look out! We're Coming to Get You!" is a flood of images driven by a tempest of guitars. The film's creators jam 20 years of German music history into 120 minutes of film. Musicians from BLIND PASSENGERS, DIE SKEPTIKER, SANDOW and other bands explode their way through the film. Fans of the DEFA documentary "Flüstern und Schreien" ("Whisper and Shout") already know the stars of that film, Aljoscha, Paul and Flake of the band Feeling B. Here they have a chance to see how these musicians survived the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the "escalation of possibilities" that came with it. And you're allowed to laugh, too!

Wenn Mutti früh zur Arbeit geht

October 2022 •German

Trauma Umerziehung - Heimkinder in der DDR

October 2014 •German

Der Sturz - Honeckers Ende

April 2012 •German

Erich Honecker ruled the GDR for 18 years. His fall in 1989 heralded the downfall of the state that had called itself "the better Germany" for 40 years. Nazi victim and autocrat, bourgeois and power-conscious: Honecker was an ideological hardliner who coordinated the construction of the Wall in 1961 and whose regime was known as an unjust state for Wall deaths, firing orders, the Stasi and forced adoptions. In the wake of the fall of communism, the former model socialist fell into homelessness and found himself on the run in his own country. Suffering from cancer, he managed to evade responsibility before a court by emigrating to Chile, where he died in 1994. This gripping documentary portrays the rise and fall of this contradictory German politician with an impressive array of top-class international and national contemporary witnesses. Erich Honecker would have been 100 years old on August 25, 2012.

Am Todesstreifen: DDR-Grenzer erzählen

September 2020 •German

I Love You All

February 2004 •German

A film on the surveillance and the control in East Germany also speaks about it - representing extreme and almost unbelievable image of a society which has acquired one super-narrative and developed a system which makes it impossible to even speak about the possibility of anything outside it.

Hotel Astoria

October 2020 •German

At Hotel Astoria, the former hotspot of Leipzig, guests were served champagne and turtle soup while the Stasi listened in. Animated memories from times gone by.

In Syrien auf Montage

October 1971 •German

The film is a reportage showing the help of workers from the GDR in the industrial reconstruction of Syria. We witness the friendly relationship between workers from both countries, who are jointly involved in the construction of the cotton spinning mill in Homs. In impressive pictures the exoticism of the environment and the mentality of the Syrian hosts is shown. At the same time it becomes clear that the workers from the GDR become 'ambassadors of the GDR' through their collegial behaviour and good work.

Auf der Oder

April 1970 •German

Documentary reports on the annual icing of the Oder in the 160-kilometer border area between the GDR and the People's Republic of Poland. Icebreakers from both countries with experienced skippers join forces to make the international waterway between Frankfurt and Szczecin navigable again. Everyone works hard as a team and even a broken-down ship cannot stop them from achieving their goal. A look back at the winter of 1947 with its flooding shows what the freezing of the river and the subsequent thaw can do if the ice floes are not drained into the Baltic Sea via Lake Dammsch in good time. The skippers from both countries have known each other for years and trust each other; the camaraderie that has developed on the Oder unites the people, they control the river in winter for the common benefit of all.