The most atmospheric film since the Third Man

Rating: 9/10 (5 March 2007)

A truly amazing and insightful movie, especially considering that the director, Henckel Von Donnersmarck, was only 16 in 1989 when the Wall came down. He must have relied on a number of personal witnesses of the era (possibly and probably from his own family), and also have done extensive research in archives of the Stasi.
My husband was Czech and escaped his beloved country in March of 1948, when the Communists took over. He left behind his ailing father, who pushed him to leave, knowing that he would never see his son again, which proved true since the 63 year old man died in 1954. Also stayed his older sister and her family of husband and one year old twin girls. His sister and her family started visiting him in France (where he was living at the time) in the early sixties, and then in the eighties in Canada, where we had settled in 1979. Since he had left, his family kept on being persecuted, interrogated, spied on and professionally demoted. When I visited them for the first time in Czechoslovakia in 1987 after my husband died, my sister-in-law whispered in my ear that we had to be very careful of what we were saying, since the superintendent of the building was a police informant who had probably bugged their apartment.
The actors, most of them relatively too young to have known the full extent of the abuses of the regime, are all excellent, with the notable exception of the leading lady, who seemed notably emotionless and uninvolved, motivating my not giving a perfect 10 to this seminal movie.