10/02/2003 - Wolfgang Becker's often hilarious comedy about the unforgettable Fall of the Berlin Wall

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Berlin is a city of divisions and separations. Those are also the main themes of Goodbye Lenin! [+see also:
trailer
interview: Wolfgang Becker
film profile] by Wolfgang Becker, screened in competition. The division regards a city that was cut in half for many, many years by an man-made border, but also that of a family torn apart by the father’s decision to escape to the West and Freedom.

That was Wolfgang Becker’s starting point for this story set on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when a woman (Karin Sass) who is a devout communist goes into a coma. On waking up eight months later, nothing is as it was but in order to avoid giving her a potentially fatal shock, her children don’t tell her anything about the end of East Germany as she knew it. They further the deception by recreating an area entirely dedicated to all things communist in a flat situated in Mitte.
Produced by Stefan Arndt’sX Filme, by Dany Levy, Tom Tykwer and Wolfgang Becker, Goodbye Lenin got a good reception in Berlin and has already been sold to a number of territories including France and Japan.

“This film is a comedy with a sad side to it,” said Wolfgang Becker. "Bernd Lichtenberg’s screenplay is very well articulated: it’s about the Wall but also and most especially about the relationship between a mother and her son. An ordinary story where the context takes on a fundamental importance. There are comic moments but we always tried to entertain without ever making the characters ridiculous.” The most dramatic moment is when the father leaves his family... “The destruction of the family unit is a very important part of the plot and this separation is also a consequence of the division of Germany. Unification did not resolve those problems. Outwardly, nothing remains of the former East Germany except for the little green men on our traffic lights, but the memories are all intact. I really tried to be as truthful to the memories as I could because memories are fundamental for all of us.”

(Translated from Italian)