Women in Berlin

See Women in Berlin and The Cat Has Nine Lives for the special price of £15 when booked at the same time. The third film in our FOKUS: Films from Germany season is The Ordinaries, with tickets at the special price of £3.50.

Chetna Vora made Women in Berlin as an exchange student in the GDR in the 1980s, a grand collection of stories and impressions, from the perspective of women. A work only made more interesting by its material history and survival through the medium of VHS.

Who knows how many films would have been lost forever if it weren’t for a lousy quality VHS tape? Women in Berlin is one such nearly lost work and is the graduation project of Chetna Vora, a student from the Indian state of Gujarat, who had come to the German Democratic Republic through the nation’s foreign student programme. Originally, she had set out to learn book printing, but after a while found herself at the GDR’s film school in Potsdam, Babelsberg, where she studied directing.

Women in Berlin became a candid epic of GDR life from a female point of view, featuring interviews with women of all ages, from teenagers to an octogenarian. Vora was supposed to only make a short, not a feature. When she refused to cut the film down, official measures were taken. Sensing impending doom, Vora found someone with access to a VHS camera and taped Frauen in Berlin, while projecting it on a wall or sheet. The original film material has vanished. This VHS, now digitised, is all that remains.