By Jason Apuzzo. Apropos of LFM contributor Jennifer Baldwin’s review of the newly restored Metropolis, PBS happens to be showing what looks to be a fine documentary on the history of the Berlin Wall tonight at 10pm EST (check your local listings as times may vary).
The title of the film is The Wall – A World Divided, and the film recently received a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Judge: “… reminiscent of the brilliant 2006 German drama The Lives of Others, which won the Oscar for best foreign film that year … The Wall—A World Divided takes us where only fine documentary filmmaking can: Into the hearts of everyday people who too often suffer at the hands of despots and their ideologies. Don’t miss it.”
The film’s trailer and further details are available at the PBS website.
I had the chance to visit the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie just a few years before the collapse of the East German communist regime. It was an overwhelming, disturbing and eerie experience. It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to see what amounts to being an enormous cage designed to trap people inside. I wish more Americans had somehow had the chance to experience the grim spectacle of The Wall themselves, in order to understand how precious – and even precarious – our freedom is. If documentaries such as this one from PBS can help restore an appreciation of our freedom, then so much the better.
Posted on June 28th, 2010 at 1:20pm.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the great events of our generation, and yet Hollywood hasn’t made one film about it. We get films about Nazi villainy every year, but none about the end of the Cold War and the fall of European Communism.
Thanks for alerting us to this documentary on PBS. It was interesting to watch it. I had the experience of crossing the Berlin Wall at the end of a trip that took me to Poland, the USSR, East Germany and West Berlin in 1967. It was so terribly dreary in East Berlin, it seemed all coal smoke, dingy buildings, dark shops with little in the way of consumer goods for sale and poor food. We crossed over to West Berlin for a few hours in the late afternoon and the contrast was incredible. West Berlin was all glitz and neon lights, bright shops with a wide range of products and wonderful places to eat. Most of all, however, was the incredible mental difference between East and West Berlin in those days. The caged-in feeling you got in East Berlin and knowing how difficult – and dangerous – it could be for anyone who wanted to leave (unless they were Western tourists like ourselves.) Even though I knew we wouldn’t have a problem at the border between the two cities, I was nervous seeing all the police and going through the various controls. I agree Jason, you really appreciate freedom when you see a situation like the one in East Berlin where the local people didn’t have it and we did. It is not something we should ever take for granted. It is very, very precious.