SHOWTIMES: 3:00p - SAT/SUN 11/7-8
Part of the WENDEKINO Film Festival - with an introduction by Dr. Brigitte Rossbacher, Germanic & Slavic Studies prior to Sunday's 3:00p show.
To make WINTER ADE, Misselwitz travelled through East Germany, talking to women about their life stories. Her intention was to create a platform for people who don’t usually have a voice. Her film focuses on private life, treated as secondary within the ideology of the GDR. The women she interviews – mothers, intellectuals, punk rockers, shift workers and retired women – talk openly about their families, careers, dreams and personal yearnings.
Filmed during the final year of the GDR, the film captures the desire for change, but the mood is predominantly hopeful. This is a fascinating and poetic film that explores the space between reality and dreams.
goethe.de
AFTER WINTER COMES SPRING (WINTER ADE) was shown at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival in 1988, exactly one year before the revolution in Leipzig in September and October 1989. Even then perceptive audience members could sense that the openness in the film had a different quality—people were suddenly unafraid of presenting themselves openly in front of the camera. AFTER WINTER COMES SPRING thus gives expression to a transparency and clarity that was otherwise missing in GDR society.
Everyone (at the Festival) could tell immediately that this was a very important film. Especially the international guests agreed that it deserved to win the main prize. When it “only” won the Silver Dove, it turned out that the GDR television representatives had tried to keep it from being honored. So there were very disparate and also very contrary forces at work here. (Cited from an interview with Claus Loeser about the film series AFTER WINTER COMES SPRING at the Berlinale '09.)
