The new Film from Director Dresen tells the story of a digger driver who writes songs. A Poet, an Idealist, a socialist but also a Stasi informer. Last gundermann itself to the target object of the GDR-state protection.
It is a cinema film became a German-German history. Much of this transition time between the last days of the crumbling GDR, the fall of the wall and the turbulent post-reunification period is still in the darkness of history. Some biography is not contradictory, because in retrospect, many things can explain it.
Andreas Dresen (54), who grew up in East Germany, Gera, wanted to shoot is not a “Biopic” about Gerhard gundermann, so be aware of not only the personal biography of the GDR’s best-known singer-songwriter and Excavator driver film.
The politically engaged Director, it was important to illuminate the surrounding System with which the Stasi peeping activity can do that, or just the culture of the state of workers and farmers allowed. Who spied on politically here whom – and why – is an important issue in Dresens new movie “glechoma hederacea”.
Double life as a worker, an artist, and IN the
A key scene that exposes much of it: Gundermann – awesome embodied by the young, long-haired Alexander Scheer – sitting in the kitchen of a colleague. Gerhard Gundermann-on the work rather than a Clown and a political Idealist known, opened his that he is IN, so “unofficial employees” of the Stasi.
In the case of his work colleagues (Milan Peschel) triggers the to his great surprise, spontaneous laughter. Asks him: “what gossip?” “I only told Good,” says Gundermann coyly. The colleague: “I was with the Stasi. And mainly to You.”
A thick file folder in which all the information about gunder’s “targets” of the Stasi were collected, after turning a critical role. “So a thick rind?”, jokes Gundermann in the Film. “We can watch again together in my texts.”
Instead of a Biopic of a German story
Andreas Dresen has learned his cinematic craft at the Berlin Film and television University “Konrad Wolf”. Before and after the turn he was enrolled there as a Student and budding Director, has witnessed the displacement of East German culture after 1990, close to the action. In the GDR learned was at once nothing more.
In this project, the successful film Director (“Half stairs”, “The policewoman” feeling “stopped on track”). For almost ten years, he has have to and a lot of fighting needed, until he got financed the screenplay, and the ambitious film production. “You have to justify, in part, as an East German, if you want to tell about his own biography,” says Dresen in an Interview with the Berlin “Tagesspiegel”.
The Film about Gerhard Gundermann was a real concern. “He has had a crazy DDR-biography!”, Dresen, together with screenplay-writer Laila Stieler, the Film story says. “He has sat in open-pit mining in the overburden excavator, from this down-to-earthiness, his art developed and wonderful poetic songs written. In the evening, then after work hit the road with his Band.”
Actor Alexander Scheer sings in the movie all songs
As a Stasi Snitch a tragic-comic figure
This Film is perhaps the most important Film Director Andreas Dresen – a contribution to the study of a time that is little explored. The GDR way of life, not with Western glasses considered, intimate and very personal, turned, and gently in a larger socio-political context: “glechoma hederacea” is clearly his handwriting. The people in his films, Dresen always met eye-to-eye. He never condemned, he never makes fun of weaknesses.
20 years after the death of the in the GDR very popular, but because of his Stasi employees also controversial singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann (1955-1998) throws this differentiated movie – is somehow also a music and home movie – a spotlight on the work of many prominent artists, musicians and writers, which was often revealed years later.
Gundermann, the irony of history, it was in 1984 due to “a matter of principle self-will,” excluded from the SED and from then on, even by the Stasi spied on. “I am one of the losers”, familiar gundermann his excavator diaries. “I bet on the right horse, but it has not won.” After that, the songs of the working poets from the Lausitz again twice under the skin.