Living in the shadow of the Wall

The ensemble cast in the 'coming-of-ager' Sun Alley, to be screened at the German Film Festival 2009. Photo / Supplied

On Monday, a wall in Berlin will, quite literally, fall. The "Festival of Freedom" is marking the 20th anniversary of the day that East Berliners, overwhelming guards by their sheer weight of numbers, walked through unmanned checkpoints into West Berlin.

The physical wall was still standing that evening, but November 9 is considered the day that it fell. The celebrations next week will include a meticulously orchestrated toppling of more than 1000 2.5m-tall foam domino tiles, stacked along the former route of the wall in the centre of the German capital.

It's the kind of striking imagery you expect from Berliners, who live in a city full of good political and public art. But two decades on from that historic event, some Germans still argue that the country has been too keen to celebrate the fall of the Wall, and too quick to obliterate the memory of the 28-year-long division - and the divisions that remain.

"There has been a powerful desire to forget," says one voice in the 1999 documentary film After the Fall. "And there has been too much forgetting."

Remembering and forgetting is a theme of the German Film Festival, which runs for a week from November 11 at Rialto Cinemas. The festival's name, Novemberkinder (Children of November), underlines its theme: two dozen films examining the uneasy legacy of the event from various perspectives.

Christoph Muecher, the director of the Goethe Institute under whose aegis the festival is being staged, says Auckland has up to now been well-served with German films in the major mid-year festival.

"But we realised that if we didn't do something to mark the anniversary, no one else was going to."

Older films Goodbye Lenin! and The Lives of Others are brought back in the programme and address the historical change Germans call "die Wende" - "the turning point". But the festival offers a rare chance to see several other films that subject the seismic social shift to scrutiny.

Perhaps the most striking is the grainy black-and-white documentary After Winter Comes Spring, in which documentarian Helke Missewitz travels to the DDR (East Germany) to talk, almost exclusively, to women about their lives. What she encountered and presents is more than just a glimpse of the sad, grubby country that it was. In talking to a range of people from factory workers to teenage runaways she takes the pulse of a people who, against all the odds, still nursed aspirations.

In contrast, After the Fall looks at Berlin in 1999 - 10 years after the change - and finds a city in a frenzy of reconstruction, as if to make up for the time it's been in mothballs.

If this all seems a bit fraught, the festival is rich in other attractions. Comrade Couture and Here We Come look at alternative fashion and breakdancing respectively in the DDR and Sun Alley is, according to Variety magazine, "a lively coming-of-ager" about teenage life in the shadow of the Wall.

LOWDOWN

What: Novemberkinder - German Film Festival

When: November 11-18

Where: Rialto, Newmarket

Info: www.goethe.de/germanfilmfestivalnz