Man goes behind Berlin Wall to find reporter

Berlin Wall: Escape To Freedom reveals the stories of courageous East Germans who dared to challenge the authorities and the Berlin Wall in their bid for freedom. From tunnelling under the Wall, to smuggling refugees in a car’s trunk, to flights over the Wall, uncover the details of sensational escape stories. It takes us into the heart of the Death Strip – a lethal zone next to the Wall filled with barbed wire, mines, attack dogs, tank traps, and armed guards - and shows us how authorities learned from each escape to make the Wall stronger and harder to beat. Finally, the Wall that was strengthened over 28 years was opened in one unbelievable night and yet the divisions of generations past still linger today in modern Berlin.

In Berlin in 1961, an American soldier and a German engineer join forces to build a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in order to smuggle out refugees, including the soldier's East German girlfriend.

An ideological and physical barrier fell on 9 November 1989 in Berlin. For 28 years, this 155 km wall divided Germany in two, separating friends and family. The recent discovery of some documents reveals the stories of those who managed to escape to join their loved ones, or simply to regain their freedom. Demonstrating imagination and courage, some dug tunnels to get under the Berlin Wall, others inflated balloons to fly over it, while others disguised themselves with fake uniforms. By combining archives, reconstitution sequences and intrigue scenes, this documentary plunges us into a Berlin that has now disappeared, through the prism of the art of escape under the GDR.

"Reportage". Images from Berlin with special consideration to the division of the city by the Berlin Wall.

"It's a letter to Berlin; a graveyard meditation (with The Wall as its marker). I spent eight months in Berlin (West) as a DAAD fellow; a true guest worker, in 1986-87. I wanted to respond in some way to this strange place. I wanted to describe the landscape of Cold War Berlin, which immediately means dichotomy and invoking the imaginary; the landscape that isn't there as well as the one that is. The only spoken text in the tape are a segment of the John F. Kennedy 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech, given at the Berlin Wall in 1962, and fragments of radio news reports, from both DDR and Bundesrepublik broadcasts."

The Berlin Wall has run through West Berlin’s Bernauer street since 1961. The bricked up facades on the other side of the street are in the East. A tenant who has lived here for 28 years talks about her daily impressions. The camera captures East German police and guard dogs on patrol and – on the West side – tourists gawking at the Wall.

It was the biggest escape in the history of the Berlin Wall: in one historic night of October 1964, 57 East-Berliners try their luck through a tunnel into West Berlin. Just before the last few reach the other side, the East German border guards notice the escape and open fire. Remarkably, all the refugees and their escape agents make it out of the tunnel unscathed, but one border guard is dead: 21-year-old officer Egon Schultz.

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

Sunday, August 13th 1961, the government of the German Democratic Republic lays the foundation stone for the 'ugliest monument in the world'. Some people start pulling their 8mm-cameras out of their cupboards to capture the images of the events. On the base of these extraordinary, widely unknown recordings and found footage, Claus Oppermann und Gerald Grotes first feature film tells many impressive forgotten stories about the rise of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to its fall in 1989, about the division of Germany and a bloody borderline through the middle of Europe. A unique documentary, put together out of hundreds of previously unreleased substandard films that have never been seen like this before. Many private archives were opened for the first time - a time travel, well worth seeing.

East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Schröder and his family dig a tunnel to escape to West Berlin as they struggle to overcome the obstacles blocking their underground path to freedom.