Last summer I had the chance to skype with Andreas Dresen --full disclosure: one of my favourite auteurs-- about his 1992 feature debut "Silent Country", which we showed on 35mm to amazed audiences in Toronto in the fall of 2014. Read the first part of my interview with Dresen here. His latest film "Als wir träumten" (German trailer), again set in the GDR around the "Wende", is in Competition at Berlinale 2015; his first experience as a young East German filmmaker at Berlinale 1990 as well as his upcoming project on a controversial GDR figure he talks about here:
JB: Andreas, your father had left the GDR in the 70s. In “Silent Country” the question is raised: Should I stay or should I go? Your protagonists in the film keep joking ‘See you in Hollywood!’, an impossibility for them. You yourself were a young film student from East Berlin in early 1989/90. Did you think of leaving?
AD: Early in May 1989, 30 of us went to Paris, with Lothar Bisky [the then Film Academy President and later left-wing German MEP] – can you imagine! And I was one of them, even though my father had left for West Germany. Bisky wanted his students to see the world. How he managed to do it, I have no idea. During the trip I seriously thought about staying. Paris in May, that was quite a temptation. And then when we got back to East Berlin… the hot dog stand next to the “Palace of Tears” [the Berlin nickname for the former border crossing at Berlin Friedrichstraße train station, where East Germans said teary goodbyes to visitors going back to West Germany], that wasn’t very elating. In that moment I thought: now I have made a major mistake in my life. It would have been easier to stay in the West, but none of us students did it. Which says a lot.
In the end, I can’t run away from myself and the world but I can change the place where I live. If I leave, I might not have the same problems that I had before. But I will have new ones. I can exchange my country for another, and maybe it is more comfortable elsewhere, but if I walk around this new world with open eyes, sooner or later I will realize that this and that and the other doesn’t feel right. And what then? Do I leave again? Will I start a new life once more? This is basically what the ending of “Silent Country” is about: the protagonist thinks about leaving, but turns around and goes back to that grey village, because he says: If I don’t make it at the theatre here, I won’t make it elsewhere. New York is also very much a province. The province is what we make provincial. And, if you want, the centre of the world can be pretty much everywhere you want it to be.
Of course everybody has to make that decision for themselves. Back then I felt that leaving would not do me much good. There were people who left and had a very good reason for it; people who had huge problems in the GDR, to the point that it wasn’t worth staying.
JB: How does your next film position itself in regard to “Silent Country”? It also carries a GDR theme that – at least chronologically – connects to “Silent Country”.
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For our big “Post-Oil City” cluster this season, I have curated a program of shorts called 
