Good Bye, Lenin! 2003. Directed by Wolfgang Becker. Screenplay by Becker, Bernd Lichtenberg. With Daniel Bruehl, Michael Gwisdek, Katrin Sass. A comedy that could only happen in Berlin, Good Bye, Lenin! is about Communism’s good old bad times and was an enormously popular and critical success both at home and abroad. When Alex’s mother, a committed socialist, goes into a coma in her East Berlin apartment in late 1989, there were two Germanys. When she wakes up eight months later the Berlin Wall is history and the country is on its way to reunification. Knowing any shock or surprise may kill her, how does Alex tell her about the disappearance of her beloved East? Or does he? Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. 118 min.
Titus Theaters
MoMA
11 West 53rd Street
As a special section of Kino!, MoMA’s annual survey of new German cinema, the Department of Film presents Kino Berlin, an exhibition of notable films made in Berlin since reunification. Organized by MoMA Senior Curator of Film Laurence Kardish, the series includes Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run (1998), Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Andreas Dresen’s Night Shapes (1999) and Summer in Berlin (2005), the Hissen Brothers’ documentary Dem Deutschen Volk (1996) on Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), as well as the American premieres of two documentaries: Hanna Schygulla’s Hanna Hannah (2007) on Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial and Manfred Wilhelms’s Berlin: Pictures of a City (1998) on the city’s radical architectural changes.
For information on buying tickets to films at MoMA, go to moma.org/visit_moma/admissions.html or call MoMA at 212-708-9400.