Exercises in Balance: Commemorating Rolf Richter's 80th Birthday – Films, Texts and Collages

At the end of October, we would like to remember screenwriter, film critic, poet and artist Rolf Richter (1932–1992). As a scriptwriter and co-director, he shot numerous DEFA documentaries with Eduard Schreiber and other filmmakers. He was one of East Germany's most important film journalists and became editor (together with Erika Richter) of the East Germany film magazine Film und Fernsehen in 1992 after it was left without an owner. From the end of 1989, Richter headed the commission for the rehabilitation and re-release of the banned DEFA films from 1965/66. In the period of reunification, he fought for the Babylon cinema to be kept open and gave it a new profile in the form of the Berliner Filmkunsthaus Babylon. Hans-Jörg Rother called him "an out-on-a-limb maverick of the real socialist film scene before reunification and a driving force for the preservation of the East German cinema landscape"; "His thoughts revolved (...) around the internal aspects of society, whose end he had seen coming and whose residues in consciousness should not fall victim to new repression."