“You have to hurry if you still want to see something. Everything disappears.” These sentences by the French painter Paul Cézanne are the motif for a cinematic search for clues at four locations in Brandenburg: Andreas Kleinert reconstructs his first ‘border crossing’ in the mid-1960s, when his parents every week with the Trabant through the passport controls between the capital of the GDR and the district of Frankfurt (Oder) to the dacha in Wandlitz, always along the green wall behind which the Politburo hid from its people at the time. Kleinert remembers his beginnings at DEFA as a set assistant in the furniture store in Babelsberg and his dream of being able to study at the only film academy in the GDR. In Brück, he revisits his time in the National People's Army and searches for the streets in the city of Brandenburg that provided the authentic backdrop for one of his feature films. Private and political-social changes come together in this modern, poetic film essay. It is more comical and laconic than nostalgic.
“You have to hurry if you still want to see something. Everything disappears.” These sentences by the French painter Paul Cézanne are the motif for a cinematic search for clues at four locations in Brandenburg: Andreas Kleinert reconstructs his first ‘border crossing’ in the mid-1960s, when his parents every week with the Trabant through the passport controls between the capital of the GDR and the district of Frankfurt (Oder) to the dacha in Wandlitz, always along the green wall behind which the Politburo hid from its people at the time. Kleinert remembers his beginnings at DEFA as a set assistant in the furniture store in Babelsberg and his dream of being able to study at the only film academy in the GDR. In Brück, he revisits his time in the National People's Army and searches for the streets in the city of Brandenburg that provided the authentic backdrop for one of his feature films. Private and political-social changes come together in this modern, poetic film essay. It is more comical and laconic than nostalgic.