This film about children in Eisenhüttenstadt, that showcase project of socialist urban development, was planned in 1981 and terminated “for reasons of state discipline” before it began. Ten years later, its protagonists are already in the West or no longer alive, Thomas Heise sweeps up the remains. Very little material, but memories. Neil Young’s ballads accompany car and train rides through the new non-places of the German East: “Gone, gone, the damage done.” From there, “Iron Age” delves into old and new conflicts – baffled parents, escapes from reality, the wish to think for oneself and not be thought. Odds and ends. A DEFA production, placed with Norddeutscher Rundfunk by Klaus Wildenhahn and awarded the Sponsoring Prize at DOK Leipzig.

“I know you” is easier said than “I know myself.” Here, someone probes their own fear in a childlike voice and sketchy images. There are certain pieces of evidence, like the shovel used by a young woman to dig a deep hole. And there is that black thing that grabs her soul like a spider. A cautious and curious mutual approach in sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract ink drawings.

Ernst Busch was hyped as an icon of the anti-fascist class struggle – by the GDR and perhaps a little by himself. He rose to fame as a film and theatre star in the 1920s and never made a secret of his leftist views. His history as a morale-boosting singer for the Communist International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his history of persecution under the Nazi regime made him a myth with an immaculate revolutionary pedigree. The portrait dedicated to him by the multi-talented director-poet Peter Voigt reveals the history of Busch’s downfall, for he also regularly went to battle against the SED party bureaucracy. Flattery, disparagement, withdrawn and re-issued party membership books … Sometimes the GDR was maddening.