"Film-Stadt-Berlin" is the name of a new DVD series that the DEFA Foundation is launching with its partner ICESTORM. It presents documentary and feature films made at DEFA and other German studios in which Berlin provided the backdrop. The program begins with EINE BERLINER ROMANZE (GDR 1956). Using the the style of Italian neorealism, the author Wolfgang Kohlhaase and director Gerhard Klein tell a poetic love story, depicting the dreams of young people who were able to plunge into the different worlds of East and West Germany. The crime film set in 1948 LEICHENSACHE ZERNIK (Helmut Nitzschke, GDR 1972) was based on the real-life case of a killer of women. Hindered by the division of the city into four sectors, the inexperienced commissar Kramm (Alexander Lang) embarks on a tough search. The film combines fictional and documentary scenes and is thus both a thriller and a chronicle of an era. (jh) (6.3.)
