“It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of the subject of modern surveillance and come out sounding like a raving paranoid,” “Karl Marx City” co-director Petra Epperlein told us. But a newly released trailer for the documentary shows that Epperlein’s subject matter is as timely as ever.
The trailer for the doc kicks off with a voiceover: “The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was the most surveilled society in history. She was born in a place called Karl Marx City, where she claims she had a happy childhood.” “She” refers to Epperlein, whose family history serves as the inspiration behind the feature.
Epperlein returned to her childhood home 25 years following the collapse of the GDR “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 and from her own family, she pulls back the curtain of her own nostalgia and enters the parallel world of the security state,” the doc’s official synopsis details. “Making eerie use of Stasi surveillance footage, the film is a Cold War mystery tale and a psycho-political look at how the larger world impacts our individual understanding of love, trust, and betrayal.”
“For obvious personal reasons, this was a difficult project to begin,” Epperlein shared with us. “While we sought answers about my father’s life and suicide, our journey also took us back into a contentious chapter in German history, one that — unlike the Nazi past — the German public still hasn’t come to terms with.”
And of course the topic of surveillance remains relevant today. As Epperlein explained, “As we embarked on our journey back to Karl Marx City, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA were very much in the news and it seemed that every other article referenced the Stasi, bringing not only new urgency and relevance to our search, but also new questions about trust, privacy, freedom, and the future.” She emphasized, “For anyone who has lived under the gaze of surveillance in a dictatorship, the implications — and dangers — of our data driven future are chilling, no matter what its architects tell us.”
“Karl Marx City” made its world premiere at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and opens in select theaters March 29. The film is co-directed by Michael Tucker. Check out the trailer below.
