Iron Curtain

Animals caught in a stalemate

By Lisa Dupuy Rabbit a La Berlin, a film by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski which will be screened on Wednesday 20 August, examines the plights of a colony of rabbits which lived between the two barriers of the Berlin Wall. Enclosed in this space, the animals lived undisturbed lives – until the Wall was […]

Summer Screening: Rabbit à la Berlin, EXIT & Oxygen

Three short films explore life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before the fall of the Berlin Wall:

Academy Award-nominated documentary Rabbit à la Berlin uses the Berlin Wall rabbit population as a metaphor for the huge transition post-communist societies underwent.

Through exceptional and rare footage shot between 10 and 20 October 1989, EXIT shows East German refugees who managed to cross the Polish border in order to reach the West German embassy in Warsaw. They talk openly about life in East Germany, not knowing the world is about to change.

During the communist dictatorship in Romania (1945-1989), thousands of people risked their lives attempting to flee their country, often inventing the most incredible methods to cross the border illegally. Oxygen is a free re-enactment of a real case.

“Why did anybody go along with totalitarianism?” – Insight with Anne Applebaum

By Jim Treadway Free societies crumbled in the decade after World War II, when Stalin took much of Eastern and Central Europe, and in a single-minded fashion, dismantled the existing institutions to build totalitarianism. This period provides the subject for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s latest book Iron Curtain, which she discussed with journalists and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm […]