Das Kaninchen bin ich

Because her brother was sentenced to three years in prison for “incitement against the state”, 19-year-old Maria is denied permission to study. Shortly afterwards, she falls in love with an older man who turns out to be the judge in her brother’s trial, and comes to recognise the mechanisms of a system that confuses law and power … Even a filmmaker as compliant with the system as Kurt Maetzig, who had previously been honoured with the highest state accolades for a two-part biography of Thälmann, is not spared the cultural-political interventions following the 11th Plenum: Open criticism of the missteps of ‘actually existing socialism’, abuse of power and arbitrariness vanishes, along with other ‘rabbit films’, straight into the poison cabinet.
(Florian Widegger)