▶ Watch the trailer
Film · 2006 · Drama
The Lives of Others
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
2006
Germany
★ 8.3 editorial score
It made an entire country look at its own surveillance state: a Stasi officer listens in on a playwright's apartment, and the last line of the film lands like a blow.
“Nothing could provide a more effective antidote to Ostalgie — that is, the tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for the days of the Berlin wall...an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police, whose tentacular network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll — a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
Where to watch
