East Germany. Summer, late 70’s. After her boyfriend Wassilij’s apparent death, Nelly Senff decides to escape from behind the Berlin Wall with her young son Aleksej, leaving her traumatic memories behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life in the West. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij’s mysterious disappearance. Is he still alive? Was he a spy? Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.
This is the story told by our European Union Film Festival selection 2014, Christian Schwochow's award-winnning "West". Schwochow based his latest film on his own experience of escaping the GDR as a child as well as the much lauded 2003 novel "Lagerfeuer" --camp fire-- by Julia Franck. When asked what fascinated him about the book, the filmmaker replied: "This very special place:
We knew that those West German emergency camps that housed GDR refugees existed, nut not what it meant to live there for so long. To me that was totally new and exciting.
Hardly anyone knows that the secret services were in those camps, interrogating people. And that people had to more or less strip naked before being let in."
See "West" on 21 November, 6pm, at the Royal Cinema, one night only & free at EUFF. Meanwhile, get a taste of the tense atmosphere in the story with this excerpt from the book, describing the moment where Nelly, Aleksej, and her West German boyfriend Gerd are driving across a bridge and get stopped by East German police:
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