IN 2010, IN CELEBRATION OF the Berlin International Film Festival’s sixtieth anniversary, its organizers staged an act of cultural-political reconciliation. The festival’s origins in 1950s’ Cold War competition could be remembered from a now integrated filmography as they bestowed Honorary Golden Bears for Lifetime Achievement on two figures who embodied German cinema’s divided history: the actress Hanna Schygulla, an icon of the West’s New German Cinema, and the screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, whose successful DEFA career had lasted four decades. Who better to give Kohlhaase’s laudation at the space-age Kino International on Karl-Marx-Allee than one of unified Germany’s most prolific contemporary directors, Andreas Dresen (born in 1963), a graduate of the GDR’s last film-school generation and Kohlhaase’s collaborator on two features? Dresen’s films, including Halbe Treppe (Halfway up the Stairs; released in English as Grill Point, FRG 2002), Sommer vorm Balkon (Summer in Berlin, FRG 2005), Wolke 9 (Cloud Nine, FRG 2008), and Whisky mit Wodka (Whiskey with Vodka, FRG 2009) often evoke the East German cinematic tradition in their realist aesthetic, narrative geographies, and casting. We met to discuss his experiences as a cinephile, film student, and director in the GDR, during the Wende, and in the post-Wall era.

BRIGITTA WAGNER: What was your earliest contact with cinema in the GDR? ANDREAS DRESEN: Maybe things took place in different movie theaters back then, but cinema was what it is today. You go into buildings to watch films together. It’s a social experience. This was the same in the GDR. It was cheap. I remember film tickets costing 95 pfennig (with 5 pfennig cultural tax on top of that). There were summer cinemas, and you could watch films at campgrounds. The first film I ever saw was a DEFA Indianerfilm called Weisse Wölfe (White Wolves, GDR 1969) with Gojko Mitic, whose character dies at the end of the film. I was about six years old, and my older cousins had brought me along. I was so stirred up by the size of the image, by seeing a film for the first time, and then by this death, that I cried.

BW: Which films did you watch as a young person in the 1970s?

AD: There were one or two or three DEFA children’s films each year, but then there were others from abroad.