Steffen Mensching

A well-placed site manager and father slips into a midlife crisis and recalls promptly to a former lover. Satirical comedy that finds compelling cinematic narrative technique for the feeling of comprehensive alienation and emotional state of emergency worded precisely in images that make over room poetics, dramaturgy and color perspectivization experience the world of heroes transparent. The fact that the terseness is sometimes applied a little thick, weight to a minimum.

A financially devastated German town receives an encouraging boost with the arrival of a popular soccer star, though a heated love triangle threatens to overshadow the good vibes in this sexually liberated comedy from filmmaker Norbert Baumgarten.

The 24-year-old Andreas works as a mechanic at a tunnel building site in the Bulgarian Rhodopes. One day, he gets the startling news that his girlfriend Sabine, who is supposedly waiting for him in their far-off hometown Berlin, wants to marry another man. Seething with anger, Andreas leaves the building site and hurries to the capital in order to prevent his beloved’s wedding. On the first encounter with his rival, an athletic water polo player, Andreas comes off second best. However, neither his zest for action nor his firm intention can be shaken by this defeat. With passionate energy and some outlandish ideas he takes up the fight for Sabine’s heart.

In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel - highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns - satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for people outside. As they perform their pieces, however, the country sinks into rebellion, the prison is attacked and looted, and the people chase the clowns away. Latest from the Da-Da-R was the first film made by an artistic production group that had fought for independence within the structures of the state-owned DEFA film studio for years. "Da-Da-R" is a wordplay on the irreverent Dada art movement of the 1920s and the German acronym for East Germany- the DDR.

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