Goethe-Kino (Cinema Screening)
After the post-‘Wende’ thriller
Free Country that we showed in January and that alludes to the torture methods used by the Stasi,
The Last Execution now takes us further back in time to East Berlin in 1981, eight years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Scientist Franz Walter is unexpectedly offered a professorship – on the condition that he first works for the GDR’s foreign intelligence service before taking up his academic post. Walter agrees. He and his girlfriend get a nice apartment. He travels to West Germany with his superior, who seems to like and trust him. This too, is a nice change, and everything seems fine. But then Franz becomes more and more involved in the malicious methods of the intelligence service. He realizes that he is helping to destroy other people's lives, and he wants out.
For her psychologically dense film, the photo artist and director Franziska Stünkel was inspired by real biographies - that of the economist and Stasi captain Werner Teske, who was illegally executed on June 26, 1981 in Leipzig, being the last person to be executed in the GDR, and that of the East German soccer player Lutz Eigendorf, who, in 1979, stayed on in West Germany after a match and who was subsequently put under constant surveillance by the GDR secret service, who also used West German informants. Stünkel shows with oppressive clarity how the regime perfidiously used people's goals and desires to lure them in, and when luring didn't work, to exert pressure on them. In a pivotal scene between Walter and his partner, it also becomes clear how ruthlessly the system undermined the trust between people close to each other in order to cut the ground under someone’s feet. During the course of the film Frank Walter morphs from a somewhat naïve, life-and-its-comforts-loving opportunist to a desperate man, a transformation that Lars Eidinger plays movingly.
Germany 2021, colour, 116 mins. With English subtitles.
Director: Franziska Stünkel. With Lars Eidinger, Luise Heyer, Devid Striesow, Paula Kalenberg, Victoria Trauttmansdorff, Peter Benedict, Moritz Jahn, Peter Lohmeyer.
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Franziska Stünkel
Franziska Stünkel was born in Göttingen in 1973. From 1994 she studied screenwriting and film direction at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Kassel, followed by film studies in Hildesheim in 1996. In 1999 she went to the FH Hannover, where she studied film in the faculty of fine arts. After graduating in 2004, Stünkel became a master student of Prof. Uwe Schrader. As a student, she made several short films, some of them award-winning.
Franziska Stünkel made her feature film debut with Vineta (2006), a film adaptation of Moritz Rinke's play Republik Vineta, starring Peter Lohmeyer, Ulrich Matthes, Justus von Dohnányi and Susanne Wolff. It won several awards and Stünkel was nominated for the German Film Award in the screenplay category.
In 2012 Stünkel realised the 18-hour TV documentary Der Tag der Norddeutschen (translates as ‘The Day of the North Germans’). Made from over 700 hours of footage it showed the everyday life of 121 people in a single day. It was first broadcast in real time, from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, on 10 November 2012 on German.
In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Franziska Stünkel has always been active as a photo artist. In cooperation with the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover she developed the project "Tell Me Their Story" (2010), in which artists developed a film scene based on a photograph by Stünkel and then presented it at the opening event. Visitors also had the opportunity to write their own film scenes, which then became part of the installation. Over the years, Stünkel's photographic works have been shown in various galleries, art associations and museums, such as Art Galerie 7 in Cologne, Museum Heylshof in Worms and Galerie Robert Drees in Hanover. In 2010 she received the Audi Art Award for photography, in 2014 the City of Hannover Prize and in 2015 the Berlin Hyp Prize.
In autumn 2019 Franziska Stünkel began shooting her second feature film The Last Execution (Nahschuss), which premiered at the Munich Film Festival 2021, with Stünkel winning the Award for Best Screenplay. The theatrical release was in August 2021. (Source: filmportal.de, edited)
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