Movies: Defa Studio Fur Wochenschau Und Dokumentarfilme

Volker Koepp revisits Zehdenick and Grüneberg, East Germany. People are struggling with the new political and economical conditions shortly before the German Reunification....

Sitting at her typewriter, listening to tango music, she dreams. Buenos Aires and Montevideo are far away, a different world where, long ago, the tango came into being. A dream about dance and music, as well as about unfulfilled desire and wanderlust...

This first co-production between the GDR and Great Britain is intended to contribute to an understanding of the situation and attitudes of millions of working people in opposing social orders. Using the example of shipyard workers, fishermen, the bri...

A documentary about young people just starting their higher education and their professional life....

36 year old welder Karin works at an agricultural factory in Mecklenburg, Germany....

Documents important parts of the East German rock music scene of the late 1980s, from well-established bands like Silly, to underground rock bands like Feeling B. This road movie features young people using music to express their take on life, opposi...

Documentary short about the Leipzig Tradefair in 1946....

Documentary about the merging of the Communist Party of Germany and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in the Soviet occupation zone, a merger that would lead to the creation of the Socialist Unity Party that would rule the soon-to-be-created East ...

Volker Koepp's video essay honoring the German poet Johannes Bobrowski (1917–1965)....

Portrait of 80 year old Gustav J., born in Lithuania, who became a blacksmith and whose paths of life led him to East Prussia, Russia and finally to Germany....

Photographer Gundula Schulze wrote her graduate thesis on "nude photography of women in East Germany". It's a subject she continues to pursue in her photography. She considers the stereotype of superficial nude photography anachronistic, and talks vi...

From an official perspective, marginal youth culture did not exist in East Germany. The topic of subcultures was taboo in the GDR, and groups such as goths, skinheads, anti-skins, punks and neo-Nazis were dismissed as social deviations promoted by we...

The futuristically trendy moderator Chris Wallasch leads the viewer through this program exploring what love might look like in 2002. Passengers at the Berlin-Schönefeld airport are questioned about how they imagine life in thirty years. These interv...

Voigt, Kroske and Richter were among the first filmmakers who documented the events of the historic 9th of October 1989. Their “material” reflects them from different angles: protesters, workers, opposition members, policemen, street sweepers and fun...

Martha Bieder is the last rubble-woman in Berlin Rummelsburg. Every day, rain or shine, she stands at the conveyor belt - as she has for decades - sorting through rubble. After a retirement party thrown for her by her male colleagues, she tells her s...

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 ...

Documenting the rebuilding of Potsdam one year after the war under Soviet supervision....

Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk about his life and war campaigns in Af...

A documentary about the village Kienitz at the river Oder, about the people, their life, their history....

The only documentary ever made by DEFA on the topic of homosexuality was this public education film commissioned by the Hygiene Museum Dresden and produced in cooperation with East German gay and lesbian activists. In interviews, GDR lesbians and ga...