Berlin – Prenzlauer Berg: Begegnungen zwischen dem 1. Mai und dem 1. Juli 1990

Turning Times: Petra Tschörtner was an East Berlin documentary filmmaker who was one of the great hopes of East German documentary film in the late 1980s, along with Helke Misselwitz and Thomas Heise. In reunified Germany, however, Tschörtner could no longer make films, which wasn’t a fate suffered by her alone. The “Wendezeitfilm” BERLIN - PRENZLAUER BERG, shot between Eberswalderstrasse and Mauerpark in Prenzlauer Berg during the transitional period of the state treaty between the two German states and the beginning of monetary union on July 1, 1990, made her the chronicler of the Wende. Breathlessly and yet with infinite gentleness and in the style of direct cinema, the film captures the facets of a declining world and its inhabitants, their hopes and their fears, and not least a district that ten years later was already unrecognizable after its former inhabitants were replaced. Tschörtner died in 2012 at the age of 54. Her films were re-digitized to mark the 10th anniversary of her death. (Clarissa Thieme)