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Kuhle Wampe
Brechtian drama about a family evicted from their family and forced to move to a tent camp on the outskirts of Berlin during the Great Depression.
Director: Slatan Dudow
Overview
At the height of the Depression, Anni and her family are evicted from their Berlin apartment and forced to move in with her boyfriend, Fritz, at Kuhle Wampe, a lakeside camp on the outskirts of Berlin that now accommodates the ever-growing number of the dispossessed. When Anni’s relationship with Fritz ends, she moves back to Berlin and gets involved in the worker’s youth movement.
Often described as the only communist film to come out of Weimar Germany, Kuhle Wampe was a creative collaboration between Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Ottwalt, Slatan Dudow, Hanns Eisler and Geor Höllering. Conceived at the political and artistic watershed of the Weimar Republic, it was swiftly banned in 1933 as the Nazis took power. This semi-documentary combines inspired montage sequences with intimate realist and comic scenes of family life, drive along by Eisler’s celebrated score.
mild sex references, suicide scene
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