User Reviews

First of all director Manfred Wilhelms made a film to let us find the original Potsdamer Platz. There is little, almost no film material left about the original place. We get to know the evolution of the place and its liveliness from before 1920 until the center of Berlin was nearly completely destroyed in 1945. The original Potsdamer Platz was an extraordinary place, full of life until it was erased and it never became again what it was. What was it like? It is a past era, which for us is history now. A real tour guide appears and among his listeners a reporter. The guide gives us a good insight into former East and West Germany and life connected to the area of Potsdamer Platz, a huge deserted area, a desert between the walls of the divided Berlin,then the place becomes alive in interviews,old people tell their incredible stories about the place. Wilhelms made it more then a documentary. Creating a fictive main character, a reporter ( Arno Lüning ) who gathers sounds and noises around and above the new Potsdamer Platz for his radio play, he manages to take us along into other dimensions. It becomes a story. Sometimes these charming images become surreal and invite us to imagine what things could have been like. Sometimes it reminds us of 'Heaven above Berlin'(W.Wenders). Wilhelms creates with his team and his camera a lot of different atmospheres and rhythms. The camera really searches staying with things and the spectator, nowadays always running to not miss something, may stay with what is happening. In natural slow rhythms, we discover, what we often miss , as modern life often means to run after things, where as things happen right in front of us, with us. It gets amazing fast with some integrated artwork of Fred Walther, a filmmaker himself. This film is an epic investigating and searching what really was and what is now , that preserves the act of reconstructing the place with the face of the new Potsdamer Platz and todays life, with a reporter appearing again and again, partly beyond time, passing over a flair. Due to the fact, that it will be a mirror into the past for coming generations Wilhelms avoided to cut the film shorter than 320 minutes. It was shown and well appreciated at the Berlinale 2001, on Arte TV, as well as on other festivals.