Westler: East of the Wall

A refreshing, direct, and effective gay love story that displays the irrelevance of big budgets where honesty, imagination, and something to say takes their place. West Berliner Felix meets out-of-work waiter Thomas in Alexanderplatz while taking his Amerikanischer Freund for a day trip to East Berlin; they fall in love, but political, border, and visiting restrictions conspire to pull them apart. This low-budget first feature, composed partly of illegal video footage shot in the East, is full of fascinating semi-documentary-style detail and unforced insights into the lives of its protagonists, and provides a quietly uplifting, totally unpretentious attack on the absurdity and inhumanity of repression, whatever its form.