Synopsis
On 21 December 1989 the members of cult West Berlin band Einstürzende Neubauten hit the road for their very first concert in East Berlin, capital of the GDR. It was a long, strange journey. The Berlin Wall was still standing and there were tedious border controls. Filmmaker and friend Uli M Schueppel accompanied the band on what was an extraordinary day for musicians who for the most part had grown up in West Berlin and had never been granted an official permit to perform in the GDR. But most notably, this concert was also an extraordinary event for the GDR audience. Elektrokohle merges the paths of West and East, combining original footage with new material of the concertgoers who 20 years later retrace the paths that led them to the concert hall. Out of these various Western/Eastern routes to the concert emerges a temporal mosaic of Berlin, a journey back to an “in-between time” before German reunification.
CPH:DOX
Thessaloniki International Film Festival
