Sonnenallee

East Berlin, the eighties. The short end of Sonnenallee falls on the eastern side; the wall runs right there and tourists look down from the observation platform on the west. Micha lives on this street. He is seventeen and his only concern is Miriam. And records from the west; a Rolling Stones recording passes from hand to hand and finding it will get him into trouble. Border guards stand in the street, there is political instruction at school, his uncle comes from the west and his mother is thinking of getting out. Micha is interested in none of it; he wants Miriam and a record. Leander Haußmann directs and wrote the screenplay with Thomas Brussig. Alexander Scheer, Alexander Beyer and Katharina Thalbach are in the cast. It is a German production. Thomas Brussig wrote a novel from the same story; the book was published after the film. It was a large commercial success in Germany and opened an argument about how the eastern past is looked at. The narrative builds East Germany not as a story of repression but as a memory of youth; the choice was both criticised and defended. Music works inside the narrative; eastern and western recordings of the period are used together. At the end the narrator speaks about remembering itself and the film declares its own viewpoint. Its limit is balance; the political reality is lightened and some sections run to the crude. Who it is for: viewers who like German comedy and stories of the wall years. Who it is not for: the history is softened, the humour local, and the structure scattered.