Pamela Meyer-Arndt

Legendary British actor Michael Caine, who began his brilliant career on stage during the 1950s, talks about his private life, his work in film and the books he has written.

The rough, unkempt facades in Prenzlauer Berg – as if the skin had been peeled off the houses, says photographer Tina Bara. Having grown up in a prefabricated building, the young woman was drawn to East Berlin. She quickly got in conflict with the state, just like the artists Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer, whom director Pamela Meyer-Arndt questions in her film about memories, traumas and creative genesis.

Three East German female photographers talk about their experiences making art in the East, and what it was like to work during time when every photographer working on their own in the GDR had entire photographic works and book projects hidden away in drawers, certain that they would probably never be shown publicly.

Ute and Werner Mahler are among the most important contemporary German photographers. They are famous for their photographs in the GDR magazine SIBYLLE and as co-founders of the OSTKREUZ photo agency. Ute Mahler was born at the end of October 1949 in the village of Berka an der Wipper in the Kyffhäuserkreis district of Thuringia. Her father was a master miller, and her home was the mill. DORFLIEBE shows Berka from the 1950s to the present day through the photographs of the Mahlers—and Ute Mahler's father Ludwig Schirmer, a passionate amateur photographer. The film gradually reveals the Mahlers' relationship with Berka and its inhabitants. A Heimatfilm – a film about home – that also shows how the people of Berka repeatedly struggle to build a new life for themselves: after the war, under socialism, in the period around 1989, and as citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.