DEFA is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. Since 1946, the East German state film studio has been a place where propaganda was produced and control and censorship were the order of the day—yet at the same time, it was home to great artists who repeatedly fought to carve out creative freedom. We’re celebrating the legacy of these directors where it belongs: at the newly renovated Kino International on Karl-Marx-Allee, the former DEFA premiere theater—now featuring Christie laser projection, 4K, and Dolby 7.1. 

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Over eight Sundays, we’ll be screening outstanding works that have lost none of their power to this day—in the original German version with English subtitles.

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April 1945. A young Red Army soldier returns to a countryhe left as a child—Germany. In I WAS NINETEEN, Konrad Wolf drew on his own life story: born in Berlin, he emigrated and returned with the Soviet Army. An extraordinary war diary that does not seek to tell a heroic tale, but rather one of identity, guilt, and the end of something.