La Révolution silencieuse

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.

It is a true story, that is why it is so touching for us Hungarians to watch. To see how the world was informed about our revolution, and how it affected the lives of other peoples in the Eastern Bloc.

In 1956, in Hungary, we experienced being left alone. Now we learned from this movie that someone was with us. Thank you for your quiet stand, which was very loud compared to what was possible in the GDR at the time. And thanks to the filmmakers for telling it us.

How much does this matter to Hungary? - someone asks in the movie. Here is the answer: a lot.

It is a good movie about basic moral issues and solidarity.

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.

What a beautiful and impressive movie about the courageous boys and girls of a school in East Berlin in 1956