In Times of Fading Light
It’s 1989; summer is almost over; the façade of the villa on the outskirts of East Berlin is showing the first cracks. Wilhelm Powileit, a veteran of the Communist resistance, is celebrating his 90th birthday party and his family and old companions are all gathered together to congratulate their honoured comrade. The fronts are strongly divided between those who still defend Socialism as utopia and those who foresee the inevitability of its decline. Yet, they all have one thing in common: They are prisoners of history and their fates are inseparably connected with that of their country.
Based on Eugen Ruge’s much discussed social novel, which relies on clearly-defined psychological portraits to recount a vast panorama of 40 years of GDR history, scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase has created a suspenseful distillation by assembling four generations into the tightest of spaces. Building up to the finale, the characters’ moves are revealed to be just as absurd as they are tragic.