After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Karl Marx City stopped by New York Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and more, and now it’s heading to theaters this month. In Karl Marx City, documentarians Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker take a personal exploration of life under the East German Stasi, specifically through the eyes of Epperlein as she reflects on her father’s suicide. Ahead of a release next, week a new trailer has now arrived.
We said in our review, “With a clearer focus, Karl Marx City could have been the Stasi version of What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy or Inheritance, or, with more intimacy, been akin to an East German No Home Movie. While we’re told that there is 111 km of Stasi archives informing on over 17 million people and shown the archive storage units, this film spends an inordinate amount of time on Epperlein in her Sony Stereo Dynamic headphones and sensible heels. Oscillating between personal documentary and a scattered historical record, Karl Marx City leaves dramatic tension and narrative threads by the wayside in favor of casting wide thematic webs.”
Check out the trailer below.
Twenty-five years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, New York filmmaker Petra Epperlein returns to her childhood home of Karl Marx City to find the truth about her late father’s suicide and his rumored Stasi past. Had he been an informant for the secret police? Was her childhood an elaborate fiction? As she looks for answers in the Stasi’s extensive archives and from her own family, she pulls back the curtain of her own ostalgia and enters the parallel world of the security state. Making eerie use of Stasi surveillance footage, the film is a Cold War mystery tale and a psycho-political look at how the larger world impacts our individual understanding of love, trust and betrayal.
Karl Marx City opens on March 29.