Under the Pavement Lies the Strand

Director: Helma Sanders-Brahms

1975 / 103min / DCP

The debut film by Sanders-Brahm, a ripe-for-rediscovery female outlier in the male-dominated New German Cinema, Under the Pavement Lies the Strand—the title refers to a slogan much circulated in the 1968 student protests—stars Grischa Huber as an actress rehearsing for a televised production of a Greek drama who becomes romantically involved with co-star Heinrich Giskes during a dressing room fling, after which the two cross swords over such subjects as a new abortion bill and her unexpected pregnancy. “A cult film of the German feminist movement” [Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema] that features the ingenious employment of documentary footage in its fiction narrative, and an excellent introduction to the cinema of Sanders-Brahm.