The Lives of Others(2006)
dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
The watcher who learns to look away.
Where to watch: Rent on Apple TV, AmazonLetterboxd ↗
East Berlin, 1984. A Stasi captain is assigned to bug a playwright and his actress partner, a job that is really about a minister's appetite for a woman. As he listens to their lives through headphones, the surveillance state's most loyal listener starts to be changed by what he hears. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Why it’s here
The film shows what surveillance costs on both sides of the wire: the artists who learn which friends to stop trusting, and the watcher who learns what he's been protecting. What's punk is that it puts a state functionary's conscience on trial without letting the state off. What's pedagogical is the machinery: files, informers, careers decided by a phone call. It makes a bureaucracy of fear feel real in ways a textbook never does.
Where This Film Lives
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