Karl Marx City

A Filmmaker Dives Into Her Father's Past

Twenty-five years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), filmmaker Petra Epperlein returns to the proletarian Oz of her childhood to find the truth about her late father's suicide and his rumored Stasi past.

Had he been an informant for the secret police? Was her childhood an elaborate fiction? As she looks for answers in the Stasi's extensive archives, she pulls back the curtain of her own nostalgia and enters the parallel world of the security state, seeing her former life through the lens of the oppressor.

Official Selection at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Nominated for Most Innovative Documentary at the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards.

"... A smart, highly personal addition to the growing syllabus of distressingly relevant cautionary political tales. ... [suspenseful], and with a concrete sense of profound moral and emotional stakes." - A.O.Scott, The New York Times