Berlin is in Germany (1998) User Reviews

A brief version of a great film to come

[guy-bellinger · 3 August 2020]

In 2001, the young German director Hannes Stöhr made his first feature film, both sociological and humane, set in a place and time at once precise and metaphorical, entitled "Berlin is in Germany". It was about a man who had been imprisoned while the part of the city he lived in was still in the GDR. Ten years later, East Berlin no longer existed: everything had changed, from the currency in circulation to video games, from invasive English names to triumphant mercantilism. Back in 1989, the hero had a girlfriend but she was with another in 1999; moreover she had been pregnant at the time with a child who was a ten-year-old stranger to him then . A very rich film with a discreet but quite clear political content, with a very precise sociological tint (the conditions of release of a prisoner on parole, his follow-up by a social worker, his difficult conditions of reinsertion) as well as with thorough psychology (the reasons for each character were explained). But few are those who know that the same Hannes Stöhr had already dealt with the subject in a short work of the same title, which was in fact his graduation film. This is what the viewer can discover thanks to the Absolut Medien DVD which offers the fifteen minute prequel as a bonus to the feature film. The situation is the same (the prisoner released after a decade or so, his maladjustment to a new world, his desire to reconnect with his wife and to discover his son) . The trouble is that with only six times less runtime available, Hannes Stöhr can afford neither to refine nor to develop. The "Berlin is in Germany" of 1998 is therefore only a sketch of what the feature film will be, drier, more to the bone, more naked, without any dialogue other than functional. The fact is that, as the writer-director is unable to go into detail, everything is reduced to the initial situation: no friends as in the long version, no ups and downs, no nuances . As for the end, it is sharper, more desperate, and maybe easier also because lacking subtlety. Needless to say that I prefer the feature but one can assume that without this short version the long one would probably not exist.