Icarus

Streaming video - 1975

Mathias is eight and lives with his divorced mother in East Berlin. One day, he pays his father a surprise visit. When he opens the door, his father is confused—and Mathias notices that a strange woman is there. When he sees Mathias looking at a picture of ICARUS, he distracts the boy from the situation and tells him the legend of ICARUS. When his father promises him a sightseeing flight on his upcoming birthday, Mathias is excited; but it breaks his heart when his father fails to turn up on the appointed day. Mathias wanders through the city and decides that ICARUS didn't crash because he wouldn’t listen, but because his father forgot him. Shot in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district and near Ostbahnhof, this film was only gra...nted a limited release because officials criticized its presentation of divorce and what they considered a hostile image of socialism. There might have been another reason, however. Klaus Schlesinger (scenario) and his wife Bettina Wegner, who wrote the film’s title song, had been under Stasi surveillance for their political activities since 1974; they protested against Wolf Biermann’s expulsion in 1976 and left the GDR in the early 1980s. more