I just finished watching The Lives of Others, an extraordinary film about life in East Germany in 1984, where a totalitarian system suppressed freedom of action and thought, presumably not too differently from the way the State controls the lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human beings still today, from Iran to North Korea, and to a lesser degree also from Putin-controlled modern Russia to Venezuela.

This film offers a particularly interesting window into how peoples’ lives are impacted by the State’s intrusion and control over private lives.  It is specially powerful because it details the story not just from the perspective of an artist who is being watched, but also from the point of view of a Stasi (East Germany State Secret Police) officer who, as in real life, is not a caricature of a bad man, but a complex character with a deep commitment to the socialist state and a code of ethics that leads him to unexpected realizations and choices.

Tags: Art, Movies //