Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). 2005. Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. With Ulrich Muehe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch. Although most of the action is set in the Eastern part of Berlin, it is the idea of the neighboring West with its enticing freedom of expression that hovers over the government of the East and drives its secret police, the Stasi, to make most citizens into informers. The tightly-knit plot recognizes the unpredictable nature of human behavior, which in this brilliant thriller may or may not trump a most repressive regime. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. 137 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.