Karl Marx City (Karl Marx Stadt)

synopsis

Unsurprisingly, East Germany boasts people who are experts in suicide notes. The Soviet satellite came to an ignoble end when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, leaving behind a lot of unanswered questions, among them Petra Epperlein's suspicion that her father (a suicide) spied for the Stasi, the state police. Now a New Yorker, Epperlein, and co-filmmaker Michael Tucker return to her childhood home and, with wonderful graphic panache, investigate her family's past as well as the life of a nation in which one out of three citizens spied on the other two. Making smart use of jaw-dropping period material which includes some wildly creepy Stasi surveillance imagery, it's a Cold War mystery tale and a psycho-political look at how the larger world impacts our individual understanding of love, trust, and betrayal.