Renate Schäfer

Set in the period prior to the revolt in Timisoara in December 1989 and mirroring the events that led to the downfall of the dictator Ceausescu. -- BFI

He could have had women, he could have climbed the ladder of his accountancy career, and he could have stood on the podium next to the highest in the land. If only he had wanted to! But Farssmann, shaken by divorce and unwilling to better himself, wants to remain what he is: an ordinary bookkeeper like you and me. And so the dollar deal with Mr. Osbar from Utah (USA) is not the first time he comes into conflict with the very palpable unreality of a country called the German Democratic Republic.

Claudia and Georg Rattey, a married couple, have everything what people in their mid-thirties might wish for: a car, a farmhouse for vacations on the weekends, and their son Oliver. But their contentedness does not turn into happiness but into an inner void: Claudia and Georg have nothing left to say to each other and just live alongside each other. One day, they discover a ten-year old burglar in their half-finished vacation home.

In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel - highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns - satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for people outside. As they perform their pieces, however, the country sinks into rebellion, the prison is attacked and looted, and the people chase the clowns away. Latest from the Da-Da-R was the first film made by an artistic production group that had fought for independence within the structures of the state-owned DEFA film studio for years. "Da-Da-R" is a wordplay on the irreverent Dada art movement of the 1920s and the German acronym for East Germany- the DDR.