Petra Epperlein and her co-director/husband Michael Tucker’s previous films include “The Last Cowboy,” “Gunner Palace,” “The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair,” “Bulletproof Salesman,” “How to Fold a Flag,” “Fightville,” and “The Flag.” Epperlein and Tucker’s films explore and document issues of the post-9/11 world such as the Iraq War, journalists’ role and treatment during the War on Terror, soldiers’ homecoming, and symbols of American patriotism. In 2008, Epperlein and Tucker were honored with an Independent Spirit Award nomination for “The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair.”

“Karl Marx City” will premiere at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

PE: Twenty-five years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), I returned to the town I grew up in to find the truth about my late father’s suicide and his rumored Stasi past. Had he been an informant for the secret police? Was my childhood an elaborate fiction?

Reconstructing everyday GDR life through declassified Stasi surveillance footage, the past plays like dystopian science fiction, providing a chilling backdrop to interrogate the apparatus of control and the meaning of truth in a society where every action and thought was suspect.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

PE: For obvious personal reasons, this was a difficult project to begin. 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. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Wall, there has been no real attempt at national reconciliation, even while the victims of the regime and Stasi perpetrators are often direct neighbors.

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.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

PE: It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of the subject of modern surveillance and come out sounding like a raving paranoid. However, 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.

In 2009, when Google’s Eric Schmidt was asked by CNBC if users could trust Google, he replied, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” These words, spoken by a Silicon Valley techno-libertarian, reveal just how much our fundamental definition of privacy has changed in the age of social media, where the most observed are the most valued, and personal validation comes from publicizing the private. Who needs informants when we so readily inform on ourselves?

In this new cryptopticon, we have become the apparatus. It doesn’t just watch us, it is us and every aspect of our public, private, and social lives is mediated by a network that is controlled not by governments, but by corporations that entice users with “free” services that promise efficiency and convenience, while, in reality, they are simply brokers and aggregators of human behavior. We are the products and our behavior is the new currency.

Unchecked, we are in danger of enabling our own worst dystopian nightmare, where privacy is a luxury, not a right. If that sounds crazy, ponder for a moment that Facebook users have uploaded over 250 billion photographs of themselves, their families, and their friends to a company that operates the most sophisticated facial recognition software in the world. I can only imagine what the “who is who?” obsessed Stasi would have thought of a population that eagerly hits the streets armed with radio-equipped cameras that capture, tag, map, and broadcast their every encounter.

It’s easy to fear the future, but I wouldn’t trade it for the past. Just as we finished the film, the UK voted for the Brexit and Donald Trump was promising to “Make America Great Again.” Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but does anyone really want to go back to a world of walls and closed borders?

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

PE: The film tells a very personal story within an oppressive regime. To work with this set of extremely different characters in the film, my family — whom I’m very close with — on one side and the archive of the secret police in East Germany on the other side, and to keep a balance between emotional closeness and the all-seeing surveillance apparatus was a unique challenge making this film.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

PE: We finance our own films.

W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at TIFF?

PE: “Karl Marx City” is our fourth film with a World Premiere at TIFF. We are very honored to be there again. It is an exciting festival with a great market. And I love Toronto.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

PE: I love “The Arbor” by Clio Barnard. She solves the problem of one of her subjects not wanting to be in front of the camera in a super-creative way and tells a fascinating story in a very beautiful film.

W&H: Have you seen opportunities for women filmmakers increase over the last year due to the increased attention paid to the issue? If someone asked you what you thought needed to be done to get women more opportunities to direct, what would be your answer?

PE: The dilemma women face in the workforce today — in the film industry or anywhere else — is merely a reflection of general values of society. The U.S. is the only country in the Western world without paid leave for women, or men. After the birth of a child, there are no publicly-funded daycare programs for early childhood and, of course, women are almost always paid less then men.

Growing up in East Germany, where total emancipation of women was just an economic necessity for society to survive, I find it bewildering that equality between women and men is still even an issue today.

The fall of the wall brought on a throw-back to more conservative times — West German society still favored the “women belong in the kitchen while the man is out conquering the world” model in the early ’90s. Even today in Germany, with universal state-financed early childhood daycare, paid leave for both parents after their child is born, and publicly financed after school programs, etc., the pay gap between women and men still stubbornly persists.

I’m not sure why there is no meaningful progress being made. Maybe too many women of my generation think like me: Feminism and women’s emancipation are issues of the past and we don’t need to fight for true equality anymore. This is obviously not the case.

Talking about issues women face in Hollywood is definitely a great start, but the discussion needs to be cast much wider to achieve real meaningful change and true equality between women and men: What are the values of our society? How do we want to live? What kind of world do we want to leave for our children?