Sealed Lips

A German woman who is a communist has been wrongly accused and sent to a labour camp. She is released afterwards, but she can tell nobody about her past; telling it would put both her own freedom and her family’s at risk. So she has to carry a part of her life as though it never happened and chooses silence inside the order she believes in. The film does not present that silence as weakness; it tells at what point a person consents to what, and what it costs. The account puts the distance between a state’s official story and personal memory at its centre. Alexandra Maria Lara plays the lead in Bernd Bohlich’s hundred minute German film, completed in 2018.