Solo Sunny review – a rueful East German gem of ambition, loneliness and faded dreams

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Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”. Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Ka...
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‘Think about the unthinkable’: could the US handle an even worse January 6?

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The new documentary War Game follows lawmakers and military officials role-playing the response to a political coup

Is the US government prepared to withstand another January 6? That’s the question a new documentary sparking conversation at the Sundance film festival chillingly poses, arguing that US government and military officials must brace for the possibility of a potential political coup in a divided America.

War Game, directed by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, observes a closed-door, unscripted simulation of an armed attack on the Capitol based on the events of 6 January 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters and far-right stormed the building to disrupt lawmakers’ certification of Joe Biden’s election. The six-hour exercise asked a bipartisan group of US defense, intelligence and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations to role-play the administrative response to a political coup backed by rogue members of the US military in the wake of a contested election.

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