The seriousness of the campaign became clear Nov. 20 when East Germany's Communist government slapped a first-ever, open-ended ban on a Soviet publication, a magazine called Sputnik. In the mid-fifties, director Gerhard Klein and screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase made a trio of films about life in Berlin. The campaign … The films were inventive, daring, and popular. “Heiduschke’s East German Cinema is a great resource for anyone interested in the history of post-World War II Germany and its profound and lasting effect on the state of both German and international cinema today. ‘Balloon’ from director Michael Bully Herbig is a subtitled German thriller depicting the incredible story of two families attempting to defect from East to West Germany in a hot air balloon. REEL WOMEN in East Germany. For the individual films themselves, this book essentially serves as a starter’s guide to east German films, selecting only a handful of the hundreds of films produced by DEFA.” (Stephen Belden, … Premiere 2012 German Studies Association conference Milwaukee WI REEL WOMEN in East Germany is a collection of over sixty feature and documentary films that touch on the lives and work of women in the GDR.. BERLIN (AP) _ East Germany, once the Soviet Union's staunchest ideological ally, has embarked on an unprecedented campaign of censorship aimed at bridling the spread of the Kremlin's new reform policies. Designed as an aid for programmers and teachers interested in these topics, it organizes these diverse films into thematic groupings for planning film series, classes … East German border guards look through a hole in the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 1