The lives of others at 20 and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

The centerpiece of the festival is The Lives of Others, the great 2006 film about the East German Stasi. This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and winner of the best foreign film Oscar. It is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “An indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, whose 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 1984.”

The Lives of Others tells the story of Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright in mid-80s East Berlin. He is in a relationship with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Dreyman