This 11-DVD set is designed to accompany the book Last Features: East German Cinema’s Lost Generation (Camden House in 2014), by Reinhild Steingröver (Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester).
Alfred and Lisa decide to divorce after only a couple of months of marriage. Alfred takes a few days off to clear his head, riding through Berlin and meeting strangers; although he ultimately returns to Lisa, the ending remains open.
In the summer of 1945, Dresden factory workers send their colleague Kalle (Erwin Geschonneck) hundreds of miles north to pick up supplies. His attempts to travel through the Soviet occupation zone become a hilarious odyssey full of high jinks and misadventures.
Günter Walcher, 40-years-old, is a hardworking, apolitical West German businessman caught in a moral conflict. He is offered a promotion to become the head of a division—on the condition that he find a reason to fire Zacharias, a communist and the work council chairman.
When she discovers her students are hiding their true thoughts and feelings, Carla (Jutta Hoffmann), a young and idealistic teacher at the start of her career, goes against the routine opportunism, hypocritisy and small-mindedness all around her.
This two-part epic traces the development of a manor and farm in Mecklenburg, from the flight of its aristocratic landowners before the advancing Soviet troops in 1945, to just after the East German uprising of June 17, 1953, by which time it has become an agricultural cooperative.
In 1830s Cuba, a rich slave owner’s son falls for Cecilia (Daisy Granados), a proud and beautiful mulatto girl. While revolution simmers and then boils on the island, his parents force him to marry a woman of his own class.
The scene is East Germany in 1977, during the infamous Red Army Faction kidnapping of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer in West Germany. A couple of East German teens are caught with contraband photos of West German Baader-Meinhof terrorists.
Ernesto Che Guevara was only 39 years old when he was executed in the Bolivian mountains in 1967. This film tells the story of Che’s short life: his childhood in Argentina, his early interest in the Spanish Civil War, and the motorcycle trip through Latin America that changed his life forever.
An anthology of portraits from one of the longest-running documentary projects in film history, which has followed children who started school in August 1961 for almost five decades (the last part was released in 2007). No DEFA documentary film is as renowned as the personal accounts of