East Side Story

Narrator:
This is the odyssey of a filmmaker searching for music, fun and colors in the world of ambiguity and suspicion - the world behind the Iron Curtain.

Narrator:
What do you know about life there? What did anyone ever hear about except the grayness, the militarism, and the constant beating of propaganda?

Narrator:
The melody of life seemed to offer only one refrain: Work, work and more work.

Karin Schr?der:
[on finding a musical model] [subtitled version] I only started thinking about someone like Doris Day when a foreigner told me I was the Doris Day of the East.

Narrator:
The whole genre was a lost child, if you even accept it as a genre at all.

Narrator:
These movies offered escape, hope and hit songs. They were part of another Socialist mythology, one that offered a positive view: Happiness and the good life.

Narrator:
Who knows how things might have turned out if Socialism could have just been more fun?