From Us To Me

From Us To Me

October 1987. Amber Films, a collective based in Newcastle, become the only British film crew to make a documentary inside the German Democratic Republic. In November 1989, a year after the film’s release, the fall of the Wall signals the end of the GDR. 25 years later, the British return – this time Amber Films and Moving Films with Richard, Ellie and Pete from Amber and Beatrix from Bremen, who lived in West Berlin during GDR times.

Warnemünde, September 2014. When Amber and Moving Films track down the protagonists from 1987 in the small harbour, they find a very different Warnemünde. Back then, Amber had filmed two different groups: Members of a fisheries production cooperative and crane drivers from a brigade of the Warnow shipyard in Warnemünde. In fact, both companies have disappeared today.

But they find – with the help of the local press – at least 8 of the protagonists of that time and listen to their story with excitement: When the Wende came, when the Wall fell, hardly anyone there and then wanted to believe it. One of them had just been on her honeymoon in Cuba and returned shocked to another GDR. And the fates of the protagonists that now follow are representative of many in the former GDR: winners, losers, frustrated people and knights of fortune. When they talk about themselves, when they explain why they said what they did back in 1987, they realise how much they self-censored. And then there was the Treuhand, which organised the sell-off of the GDR. The jobs from back then have disappeared. Some will never get over it, but others feel liberated.