Films by Ludwig Bestehorn

2016, 88 min
by Signe Astrup

When the Berlin Wall crumbled down in 1989 and six months later East and West Germany united, more than 250.000 highly skilled East German soldiers lost their jobs, their homeland and everything they believed in.Stasi officers, border guards, and police agents social image plummeted from “model citizens” to criminal perpetrators blamed for their part in Germany’s dark 20th century history. More than 25 years later filmmaker Signe Astrup meets some of those former GDR soldiers who today find themselves living on the edge of society. Some cling to the their old beliefs and vows of loyalty to the GDR where their identity and future were clear and life had meaning.

Germany 2011, 97 min
by Annekatrin Hendel

Once with the Stasi, always with the Stasi? Once you were in the agent controller's grasp you could never escape - that's what they say, anyway. Writer Paul Gratzik was an unofficial informer for the GDR State Security Service for twenty years, broke with them in the 80's and exposed his identity. "Vaterlandsverräter" ("Traitors to the Fatherland") is a portrait of an exceptional man. On one hand it is a psychological profile of one of an extraordinarily paradoxical figure, a "man of extremes": satyr, seducer, radical and hermit. On the other hand it tells a story about the GDR, its critics and the Stasi of the kind that has never been told before in all the 20 years since the end of East Germany.