DEFA director Herrmann Zschoche in Person
When he is 14, Stefan’s parents decide to move the family to Marzahn, a desolate high-rise suburb of Berlin that is still under construction. Stefan’s innocent childhood suddenly ends when he encounters the bullying of an older boy and his gang. Officials accused director Herrmann Zschoche and scriptwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf of giving a distorted, negative view of socialist reality. They required that the team make several edits and change the final scene, which in the original cut was open-ended.
GDR 1982
Directed by Herrmann Zschoche
88 min
© Herrmann Zschoche
Herrmann Zschoche was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1934. He studied directing at the Deutsche Filmakademie in Potsdam-Babelsberg and worked as a director at the East German DEFA Studio for Feature Films from 1960 to 1991. His first successes were primarily children’s films, followed by films about young people that struck a chord among the general public. Prominent themes in Zschoche’s work are the emancipation of women and the critical confrontation between young people and the older generation. After the Wall came down, Zschoche mainly directed films for major German television stations. Zschoche is also known as an author and has written books, including on the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and the most important 19th century German realist writer, Theodor Fontane.
© DEFA
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