Schönemann visits the place where the border in Wartha between East and West Germany is being torn down. This is where Schönemann received amnesty in 1985 and was able to go to West Germany. Only one year ago in 1984, she realized she could no longer make films in East Germany and requested to move to West Germany with her husband, but was arrested by the Stasi for interfering with activities and sentenced to 12 months. The director visits the prison she had been locked up in and meets with a warden and then a woman she spent the first two months in prison with, the judge who sentenced her, the director of DEFA Studio, and the lawyer who worked to free her to ask if they remember her. Schönemann takes a camera into the place that had imprisoned her body and her time to face the darkest part of her past. She asks many questions including why she had been locked up, why her mother was not allowed to visit her, and what DEFA Studio thought of her but doesn’t get many answers. All they say is that they did what was expected according to state laws and regulations at the time and that they don’t want to talk about it. A system that dispels humanity under the censorship and regulations of a massive ideology, a country divided in two, and people stripped of their freedom under it all are things quite familiar to us living in a country divided into North and South with a war that has still not officially ended.
Sibylle Schönemann (1953~) Born in Berlin, Germany
After majoring in directing at the University of Film and Drama in 1974, she was an assistant director at the DEFA Studio. As she says in Locked up Time, she requested to leave GDR to go to West Germany in 1984 but was arrested by the State Security Service and was found guilty of interfering with state activities in February of 1985. She eventually moved to Hamburg, West Germany in 1985 and worked as a director and screenwriter. In 1990, she made Locked up Time, considered her most important film, and has been working as a freelance writer and director.
