Saturday November 3 The Lives of Others   15 cert              138 minutes

Germany, 2006, Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Starring Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck,
Winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film, The Lives of Others offers a behind the scenes portrait of the Stasi at work in 1980’s East Germany. Mühe plays Wiesler, a loyal and dedicated operative, experienced, reliable, an exemplar in the art of surveillance and persuasion. Georg Dreyman, a celebrated playwright, and his beautiful girlfriend, actress Christa-Maria, are glamorous and high profile liberal intellectuals, with connections in politically subversive circles. A powerful colleague in the Ministry of Culture – with designs on Christa Maria - engages Weisler to observe the couple and expose Dreyman’s participation in activities that threaten to expose life in the GDR. What ensues is a compelling political thriller, capturing the sinister brutalities and routine paranoia in a society in which a reputed 2% of people were secret informers for the State. But it is also satisfying on a human level, as a portrait of a lonely figure increasingly captivated by his prey – the freedoms and pleasures of their lives, and the richness so terribly lacking in his own. It has, to say the least, caused a sensation in its native Germany. Commercially and critically lauded, but also a highly contentious exposure of an all too recent political regime, at a time when collective cultural memory is more inclined to forget. In German with English subtitles.

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