Orson Wells Ressurection Award

It is as rare as it is precious the work of artistic creation that manages to tap into the recogniseable core of experiences of what one may call "humanity". To do so in a German context, a German story deep inside the German history, is, for very opposite reason, all the more rare and all the more precious. And all the more worthy of my Orson Wells Ressurection Award.

The film traces the steps of Captain Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, a ruthless, methodical officer of the East German political police, the Stasi, that finds himself a new mission. The film then goes on to collect the events that lead Wiesler, code name HGW XX/7, to change the nature of that mission.

With the intimacy and the reserved distance with which a member of the publikum watches a "play" - in this case, the life of Georg Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland - HGW XX/7 will eventually seek salvation for his own life.