Crew
It was a foundational myth of the GDR that it was anti-fascist and free of Nazis. But was that really the case? The film takes a critical look on the actual way the brown heritage was dealt with in the GDR.
Explores history through the stories of three major Russian cities: St Petersburg, Volgograd – the former Stalingrad, and Moscow.
Crime is something that usually happens in secret, away from the public eye, indeed away from virtually everyone's view. This is all the more true for organized crime, whose representatives go to great lengths to conduct their brutal, lucrative business undetected and in secret. Perhaps it is above all this contradiction between crime and openness from which this documentary draws its shocking effect. For rarely before have high-ranking gangsters spoken so candidly - and here and there so brutally openly that you can hardly believe your ears - in front of the camera about their careers, about extortion and torture, robbery and murder.
The Verfassungsschutz wants to be an "early warning system" against the dangers to our democracy. Critics accuse the intelligence service of being "blind in the right eye". But how does the agency deal with the increasing networking of new right-wing extremist groups and the new virtual threat?
For over 25 years, the BBC gave voice to the silenced people of East Germany by inviting them to secretly write in to a radio programme called Letters without Signature. Broadcast on the BBC's German Service, the programme gave voice to ordinary East German citizens who wrote about life under the repressive communist regime. On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this documentary explores an unknown story of the Cold War. It looks at the impact of the Letters without Signature series on both the letter writers in East Germany - who faced jail if discovered - and the producers of the show in London, particularly its mysterious presenter, Austin Harrison. Using never-before-seen Stasi files and recordings, London Calling: Cold War Letters documents the tit-for-tat propaganda war between the Stasi and BBC. It reveals a fascinating world of spies, secret state subterfuge and individual acts of bravery.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt fĂĽr Verfassungsschutz) was founded in 1950 and, since reunification, has relied on the 1990 German Constitutional Protection Act to provide an "early warning system" against threats to democracy. While this intelligence service has been targeting far-left groups and radical Islamists for decades, its critics recently accused it of being "blind in the right eye" - in other words, of neglecting the rise in violence attributed to the far right. Indeed, the institution was powerless to thwart the series of fatal attacks perpetrated between 2000 and 2011 by the neo-Nazi group Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU, "National Socialist Underground"), sparking astonishment and an avalanche of criticism in Germany.
