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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Deadland review – melancholy horror smuggles deep themes across the US-Mexico border

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Lance Larson’s feature debut uses horror tropes to tackle themes of racism, immigration and post-traumatic stress disorder

Screened at SXSW last year but still relevant given the ongoing debate about immigration in the US, an especially live issue in election year, this offers a border-set ghost story that’s haunting in more ways than one. For a start, it’s not especially gory or scary; the tone is more melancholy and guilt-freighted, offering a study of masculine and, in particular, paternal anxiety that’s aggravated by divided loyalties. The main protagonist is Angel Waters (Roberto Urbina), a Mexican-American border guard who is the head of his small patrol unit not far from El Paso.

The son of a Mexican father he never knew and a white American woman who has recently died, Angel is now devoted to his pregnant wife Hannah (Kendal Rae, achieving a lot with a thinly written part); he only wants to do the best he can for the people who cross the border every day, even if he’s seldom thanked for sometimes saving their lives. For example, one day he shouts warnings in Spanish that the river isn’t safe to a lone stranger (Julio Cesar Cedillo) he spots trying to cross, and minutes later the man is swept away.

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