The Burning Wall

Midway through Beller's documentary about the secret history of East Germany, the camera shows an enormous safe door being unlocked, then another. This is the entrance to a vast hangar-like building housing the thousands of boxes and documents that constitute the Stasi's archives, 50 years' worth of transcripts and recordings made by an organisation which prided itself on its surveillance techniques and its uncanny ability to make East German citizens denounce one another. Beller interviews officers of the Stasi secret police as well as former dissidents, while chronicling the events leading up to the destruction of the Berlin Wall. There's a grim humour as well as considerable pathos in her account of how the ideals on which the state was founded were so quickly corrupted.