The Silent Revolution

While most films regarding this period focus on spies, politicians, military, this one gives us a hindsight about ordinary people.

A little background info would be useful. The characters live in a city called Stalinstadt, which is on the Polish border, far from Berlin and the West German border, so in short a hard place if you want to escape. For a German public, it is obvious, but for an international audience, it lacks a litte introduction.

The best part of those German movies and series produced at Babelsberg studios (Ghost Writer, Silence, Babylon Berlin) is the aesthetics and design. The clothes, furniture, cars, every object seems to be carefully researched. I find the visual appeal sometimes better than the story itself.

About the plot, it is alright. I was surprised to see how free were East Germans before the building of the wall, since the secret police was in its early stages yet.

This is an excellent movie about life on the wrong side of the Iron curtain. It depicts the terror and oppression by the ruling communist party on anyone not conforming to its political line. Literally everyone. The plot is scarily familiar to anyone born in the the former Eastern bloc before 1980.

By great good fortune, I was able to watch this on Kanopy, a service of some public library systems. I had never heard of it before. I watched it tonight, 18 October 2019, frequently with tears in my eyes seeing how totalitarianism destroys families and individuals. "The Silent Revolution" -- or in a better translation from the German, "The Silent Classroom" -- needs to be seen by everybody, especially today's ignorant and/or misinformed young people who chant, usually mindlessly, "socialism" and "socialism" and "socialism." They're being misled by demagogic cries of "free, free, free," but the people, including the young people, will not be free. They will be, as were the young people of the Communist Bloc nations, herded into obedient groups, not allowed to question, not allowed to keep their own property or, ultimately, their own lives. Reading the other reviews, I am horrified and disgusted at the number of apparent communists or communist sympathizers who thumbed down the favorable reviews, though I have seen exactly that reaction to another true-life film about communist oppression, "Eleni." It's rare enough to see a motion picture describing the truth about the horrors and terrors of life under communist oppression, so I am very grateful to the producers of "The Silent Revolution," and grateful to Kanopy for letting me see it.

Realistic, heart warming story about a fight against oppression

This film is even handed and explores why people take the positions they do. the themes are universal - the older generation carry the baggage of WWII, the legacy of fascism while the younger generation of high school students are idealistic and, to some extent, naive and easily manipulated. We understand why the East German government finds it imperative to stamp out 'counter revolutionary' activity. The characters are well rounded, not just evil cardboard cut outs. School officials are caught up in and compromised by a political system. The irony is by working together and maintaining solidarity the school students show precisely the qualities the 'socialist' regime of the GDR was supposed to be all about. The intrusive incidental music was the only thing which grated for me, and at times the movie lapsed in to melodrama but on the whole it was entertaining and thought provoking with a lavish attention to period detail.