Figure 1.--Here we see Rainbow-maker with his grandfather. Rainbow-maker's grandfather is seizing a machine gun with the thought of violence against his enemies in the town and the boy is trying to stop him. |
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The title is "The Land Beyond the Rainbow" ("Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen"). It was written and directed by Herwig Kipping in 1991 and is much admired in film circles as a harsh but at the same time beautiful attack on the Communist regime in East Germany during the year 1953, the height of the Stalinist repression. East German workers rioted in Berlin during 1953 and were brutally suppressed by the Soviets and East German Communist autorities. A HBC reader tells us, "I went to a lecture by a German film historian who grouped this film with others as belonging to the GDR period [IU festival], so I took his word for it. I checked on the making of this film. Since the script wasn't actually written until 1991, I guess you must be correct about the actual making. I suppose what the lecturer I heard was implying that the director and author had the idea for this film quite a few years earlier when he still lived under Stalinist control of East Germany, and savage criticism of GDR politics, economy, and morals is emphasized in the film. So while the film was released in 1991, the author had been working on the ideas expressed here in 1986 while the Stasi still controlled GDR film making. I think the lecturer may have classified it as an EAST German film because it was made at the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) studio with DEFA personnel, but after STASI controls had disappeared. I believe he felt that his artistic life was much threatened by the Communist dictatorship that controlled all films in the GDR before the Wall fell. It is interesting that the story of the film is set in 1953 at the height of Stalinist ideology in the eastern part of Germany." A reader tells us, "I read a book on the films of this period and the writing of the script for The Land Beyond the Rainbow was not finished until 1991, so they couldn't have started shooting earlier than that year. But I think the gestation of the film in the mind of the director had begun before the wall came down. You are quite right. The Stasi would never have permitted a film so harshly critical of the regime if they still had control of the film industry."
Wagner, Brigitta. Indiana University. Festival of DEFA films (2010).
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