November 2019, arsenal cinema

FilmDokument: Alcohol Consumption and Alcohol Abuse in East Germany

The mass consumption of alcohol in East Germany didn’t just pose a challenge to the authorities, doctors, and politicians, but also to filmmakers. Where did the boundary lie between social consumption, abuse, and dependence? How dangerous was alcohol for the socialist society and its image of people? The answers to these questions ranged from moralist appeals and medical explanations all the way to unflinching descriptions of dependency and illness from close-up, such as Angelika Andrees’ and Petra Tschörtner’s long-banned documentary HEIM (1979) about children’s experiences with alcohol and Eduard Schreiber’s portrait of workers dependent on alcohol in RÜCKFÄLLIG (1988) (ps) An event by CineGraph Babelsberg in collaboration with the ERC project “The Healthy Self as Body Capital” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the University of Strassburg, the Bundesarchiv, and the Deutsche Kinemathek. With an introduction by Viola Balz (11.11.)