A literally concrete representation of the ideological divide between the liberal democratic Western Bloc and the communist Eastern Bloc, the Berlin Wall split Germany’s largest city from 1961 to 1989, and its fall provided a picture-perfect moment to a world celebrating the disintegration of the Soviet-led world and the end of the Cold War. With two inventive nonfiction films—Jürgen Böttcher’s 1990 The Wall, and Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s 2020 The American Sector—this series looks at both sides of the Wall: the elation of its destruction, and the complicated reality of its aftermath.