After Winter Comes Spring

Director: Helke Misselwitz

1998 / 116min / DCP

"Shot in luminous black-and-white, Misselwitz’s After Winter Comes Spring travels a German Democratic Republic that very soon will be no more, conversing with women of all ages on stops along the way to create a group portrait of female East Germany—one that interrogates the outgoing leadership’s claims of advancing equality between the genders while looking anxiously towards the new world in the process of being born. “‘At the age of 40 I set out once again from the town of my childhood,’ explains Misselwitz at the start of her railway journey, ‘to discover how others have lived and how they want to live.’ Her film exists in the gap between the two. The women she meets speak plainly of regret, longing, and hope: the teenage runaways, the divorcée split between factory work and caring for her disabled daughter, and the great-grandmother who, after 60 years of marriage, quietly admits it was a mistake to marry her husband.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue"

Distributor: DEFA Library

Part of Trains: Long Distance Passages