Films A-Z
Face the Wall
Gesicht zur Wand
Stefan Weinert / Germany / 2009 / 85 min.
"If you have a visible injury, you can demand compensation. But psychological damage cannot be seen. And they practically destroyed my soul," says Anne K. one of five characters from the film Face the Wall. Like tens of thousands of escapees from the former GDR, she was caught, and imprisoned. Just like most people who lived through this experience, she still bears the scars to this day. The notorious Stasi secret police hindered mass attempts to escape to the West with the elaborate machinery of intimidation, imprisonment, denouncements and psychological and physical terror. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a large portion of East Germans remember the GDR with nostalgia in a manner similar to other post-communist states. The victims of that repressive regime, however, are not willing to reconcile themselves to their nation's loss of memory. Consequently, in this sensitively made documentary, the five protagonists speak very openly about the painful experiences of the past and about the degradation, powerlessness and scars on the soul that can never be healed.
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