What happens to a fire department when its town never has any fires? That was the idea behind TruTV’s comedy Tacoma FD. But it wasn’t the first time someone thought of this. It’s also the concept behind Set a Fire, the Fire Brigade Is Coming (Zünd an, es kommt die Feuerwehr), the 1979 East German …
Category: Winfried Glatzeder
The Land Beyond the Rainbow
After the Wall came down and West Germany, for all intents and purposes, took over East Germany, there followed the inevitable retrospection. What the hell happened? How did we get from there to here? There were plenty of people who still believed in socialism and thought it could lead to a better world than unbridled …
No Proof for Murder
No Proof for Murder (Für Mord kein Beweis) belongs to the film genre that Germans (East and West) call Krimis. We’d call them “crime films,” although we never do, preferring instead to parse things out as films noir, mysteries, and thrillers. No Proof for Murder is a good example of the East German style of …
Till Eulenspiegel
Every country has its folk heroes. Many of these, such as Robin Hood, William Tell, and Fong Sai-yuk, were most likely real people, but any facts about them are so buried by history that all we have left is the folklore. Others, such as Paul Bunyan and Beowulf, started life as folktales and have never …
The Flight
One of the joys of East German cinema is watching the way film and reality slam into each other. A perfect example of this is The Flight (Die Flucht), the story of Dr. Schmith, a medical researcher who's torn between staying in East Germany and fleeing to the West. He initially decides to leave the …
East German Cinema Blog 