OKTOBERFILM Goldstein & Binninger GbR

Germany 2018, 72 min
by Andreas Goldstein

My father Klaus Gysi - Jew and communist - made his career in the former GDR after years of illegality in Nazi Germany. The fall of socialism burnt his life efforts in one brief moment. The film THE COMMUNIST tries to reflect on his failure from the viewpoint of my own experiences within this historical time. My fundamental historical experience is opportunism. 1990 people already forgot what they believed in the year before. So did my father, one of the leading operatives of the GDR, who now calls the state he worked for all his life a dictatorship which should have been prevented. A sudden change of heart which disturbed me and was the reason to make this movie.

Germany 2011, 84 min
by Britt Beyer

BECOMING GERMAN is a documentary about an integration course at a Berlin adult education centre. The language courses have an educational subtext: they not only teach migrants how to speak, read and write in German, but also how to behave in Germany. The film accompanies several students over a nine-month period. While following the protagonists in their daily lives, we see whether or not the ideal image of Germany portrayed in the classroom corresponds to the students’ reality. Along the way, we marvel at situations full of absurd comedy and existential tragedy.