Cinematheque KOFA

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THE DOVE ON THE ROOF

Director : Iris Gusner
1973 85min D-Cinema
Linda who works as a supervisor at a southern construction site in East Germany is a confident and independent woman. She is adored by the compulsive and passionate Daniel and Hans Weber, a veteran laborer on the construction site. The future is uncertain for both Daniel, a student who aspires for the ideal, and Hans, who moves from construction site to construction site. Linda does not give a definite answer to Hans, who asks for her hand in marriage, or to Daniel, who craves her love, and focuses only on work. The screening of this film was banned in East Germany for showing "a distorted image of the labor class" and was destroyed in the studio with no negative film preserved in the German Federal Republic Film Archive. It was finally released in 1990 but in black and white. A severely damaged color print was discovered later and digitally restored to be screened in Berlin in 2010. 

Iris Gusner (1941~) Born in Trautenau, the Czech Republic 
One of the female directors who dealt with women's liberation in East Germany and the role of women. She passed the entrance exam to the Film Academy in Babelsberg but studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow from 1961 to 1967. In 1970, she participated in the production of Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment by Konrad Wolf at DEFA in Berlin and worked as Konrad Wolf's assistant. In 1973, she directed her first film, The Dove on the Roof, but it was banned from being screened. She later directed The Blue Lamp, a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, in 1976 and then All My Girls, considered her most successful film about the laborer’s work in a light bulb factory, in 1980. She moved to Köln in West Germany in 1989 a few months before the Berlin Wall was torn down and wrote screenplays and directed TV movies. 
 
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