The Ministry for State Security - Everyday life at a public authority (2002)

The Red Elvis (2007)

A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.

• Documentary

Großes Kino made in DDR (2016)

In 2016, DEFA celebrates its 70th anniversary: the film embarks on a journey into the exciting film history of the GDR. In a comprehensive kaleidoscope, the importance of DEFA productions is illuminated, the relevance of the films as propaganda productions for the GDR, which socio-political themes were in the foreground, but also which heroes DEFA brought to the screen and celebrated as people from the people.

• Documentary

Schabowskis Zettel - Die Nacht, als die Mauer fiel (2009)

• Documentary

Ich will da sein - Jenny Gröllmann (2008)

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

• Documentary

I Am My Own Woman (1992)

The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.

• Drama
• Documentary

Lenin kam nur bis Lüdenscheid - Meine kleine deutsche Revolution (2008)

The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.

• Documentary

Honeckers letzte Reise (2019)

25 years after Erich Honecker's death, his personal secretary in Chile gives MDR an exclusive insight into the family's private archive. The material provides new background information on the dramatic escape story of the once most powerful man in the GDR, his journey to Chile and the dispute over Honecker's mortal remains.

• Documentary

Sportsfreund Lötzsch (2008)

• Documentary

DDR - die entsorgte Republik (2019)

• Documentary

Der Sturz - Honeckers Ende (2012)

Erich Honecker ruled the GDR for 18 years. His fall in 1989 heralded the downfall of the state that had called itself "the better Germany" for 40 years. Nazi victim and autocrat, bourgeois and power-conscious: Honecker was an ideological hardliner who coordinated the construction of the Wall in 1961 and whose regime was known as an unjust state for Wall deaths, firing orders, the Stasi and forced adoptions. In the wake of the fall of communism, the former model socialist fell into homelessness and found himself on the run in his own country. Suffering from cancer, he managed to evade responsibility before a court by emigrating to Chile, where he died in 1994. This gripping documentary portrays the rise and fall of this contradictory German politician with an impressive array of top-class international and national contemporary witnesses. Erich Honecker would have been 100 years old on August 25, 2012.

• Documentary

Erich Mielke - Master of Fear (2015)

Docudrama about life, career and breakdown of Erich Mielke, the former Security chief of East Germany.

• History
• Documentary

The Stasi: Secrets, Lies and British Spies (2023)

With access to recently-opened court files, Julie Etchingham reveals some of the Stasi's UK operations and asks why its other secrets are yet to be revealed.

• Documentary
• History

Reunification in the Ice: The Story of the Last GDR Antarctic Explorers (2020)

In 1989, thirteen GDR scientists and technicians set off from East Berlin to the Georg Forster research station in the Antarctic. During their expedition the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th. Cut off from the images that go around the world, the men can only experience the historical events passively. When they returned in the spring of 1991, their homeland was a foreign country. The documentary reconstructs the thoughts and feelings of the East German researchers on the basis of eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts, letters, film material, grandiose landscape shots from the location of the action and unique photos to make the consequences of the events tens of thousands of kilometers away on the small GDR expedition in the middle of the eternal ice tangible.

• Documentary
• History

Cell 364 (2020)

While Germany sits as one of the major democratic models, an ex-prisoner of the Stasi delivers from his former cell a frightening testimony that questions the sustainability of our contemporary democracies.

• Documentary

This Ain't California (2012)

A retrospective look at the youth cultures born in the German Democratic Republic. A celebration of the lust for life, a contemporary trip into the world of skate, a tale on three heroes and their boards, from their childhood in the seventies, through their teenage rebellion in the eighties and the summer of 1989, when their life changed forever, to 2011.

• Documentary
• History
• Animation

Bernau liegt am Meer (2003)

Daniel lives in Bernau, a small town north of Berlin.This film tells this 21-year-old’s story and describes the radical right-wing milieu in which he grew up. In his candid portrait of how right-wing radicalism breeds, Daniel explains how difficult it is to break out of a vicious circle of violence, self-hatred and a right-wing extremist frame of mind.

• Documentary

Karl Marx City (2017)

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker take a powerfully personal journey through the former East Germany, as Epperlein investigates her father’s 1999 suicide and the possibility that he may have worked as a spy for the dreaded Stasi security service.

• Documentary

After Winter Comes Spring (1989)

A locomotive journey traversing the North to the South of the German Democratic Republic on the eve of its dissolution. Labourers, punks, mothers, intellectuals, young and old are implored to reflect on their life choices, the sacrifices they've made, and their place in the world. Despite everything, hope persists.

• Documentary

The Spy Who Ended Up in the Cold (2014)

A documentary spy thriller that takes place during the Cold War but which gets its resolution today in the small village of Burträsk outside Umeå, northern Sweden. A deeply-believing priest, well-liked and respected by everyone or a ruthless spy who has no hesitation in referring his friends and colleagues to the dreaded security service STASI in the former GDR. Who is Aleksander Radler, the man with two different personalities?

• Documentary
• History

Alfred (1986)

Short biographical documentary about the life of Alfred Florstedt and his life as a progressive communist from the Weimar Republic to his death in 1985.

• Documentary