2016/17 | 98 min.
My Wonderful West Berlin
By Wieland Speck
My Wonderful West Berlin
Director: Jochen Hick | Germany, 2016/17 | 98 minutes | Color, black & white
Laguages: German with German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew subtitles
World distributor: Galeria Alaska Productions
Availabe at: Goethe-Institut
Jochen Hick, who in 1989 directed the first German feature film on AIDS, Via Appia, is something of a chronicler of the gay movement in Germany and Eastern Europe. With Andreas Strohfeldt, he co-directed the essential documentary “Out in East Berlin” on the situation of gays and lesbians in the workers’ and peasants’ state, where homosexuality was decriminalized in 1968, much earlier than in the Federal Republic, though this by no means led to equal rights. In 1973, three days after the broadcast of Rosa von Praunheim’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives on forbidden West German television, the HIB (Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin) was founded in East Berlin. Thirteen contemporary witnesses narrate private and political developments from church to state security that eventually led to opposition to the regime.
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