German Film

Wir sagen Du! Schatz (Family Rules) is an original idea; it tells the story of a man, who faced with the rather triste prospect of spending Christmas alone, decides to steal some relatives and subsequently barricade them, and himself, into the 17th floor of a tower block for festivities en famille.

"Why set it in a tower block?" one might ask. Clearly, making the kidnapped protagonists' prospects for escape difficult is a good plot device, but there is more to it than that. There has been a shift in perception of high-rise blocks in recent years, and they are now seriously en-vogue among German directors.

Actress Hendrikje Fitz believes using a pre-fab as a backdrop is a quick way for filmmakers to establish the genre and social milieu of their movies. "You know immediately you are watching a film about people in the former East," Fitz said, "because high-rise blocks are the symbol of the GDR."

But she adds that this generation of German pre-fab movies go some way to portraying the former East Germany as a kind of operetta town, so cozy and so trashy that it was a good, if weird, place to be.

"It is the moderate way of depicting the GDR," she said. "People who lived through it don't always want to be told they lived in a dictatorship, they want to see different aspects of what they experienced." By the same token, audiences who grew up in the West are fascinated by the beehive community element of tower block life sold to them as a synonym for the former eastern Germany.

Giving humanity the hard sell

What films like Wir sagen Du! Schatz, Halbe Treppe (Grill Point) or Du bist nicht allein, another high-rise picture released earlier this year, offer their viewers is good-old fashioned humanity wrapped up in a mix of gritty reality, romanticism and comedy.

Lothar Holler, set designer on films such as Sonnenallee and Goodbye Lenin, says humanity and a feeling of sticking together are the key ingredients of pre-fab movies. "Audiences enjoy watching people overcome their problems, fight for their families and stave off their loneliness" Holler said, "and they like to see people who live outside society's norms."

Over the years, Holler's research has taken him to countless high-rise apartments where he has come face to face with a wildly eclectic mix of people, styles and takes on life.

"One lady dreamed of living in a country cottage, so she had sloping walls built into her flat and decked the whole place out in Laura Ashley. The man next-door covered his walls in beer cans, and another guy lived in a tent pitched in his living room."

Holler says these are the little worlds he tries to recreate on screen, not only because they mirror reality, but because they are what audiences want to see. "Where we conform, these on-screen personas don't," he said "and their 'anything is possible' mentality makes them exotic and hence very appealing."

Living together, sticking together

Oliver Mielke recently co-wrote, produced and directed a movie set in a pre-fab landscape. Ossis Eleven, which is due for release early next year, is a comedy about the benefits of sticking together.

Mielke, who grew up in western Germany and had little experience of tower blocks until he began to research them for his film, says he chose a high-rise location because he wanted to help dispel the prejudice which surrounds them.

"The clichés of high-rise living are deeply engrained in our minds," he said, "but in actual fact the atmosphere isn't negative at all."

What stood out for Mielke was the extent to which people stick together to organize their lives and the astonishing mix of characters who live on top of one another in a clearly defined space.

"Where else are you going to find a victim of a GDR doping scandal living next to an ex-Stasi informer who lives next to a know-it-all West German?" he asked. Where else indeed?