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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The Investigator review – harrowing documentary details search for justice after Balkan wars

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Viktor Portel’s film follows Czech investigator Vladimír Dzuro as he returns to sites of torture and death, and meets survivors as well as supporters of perpetrators

Revisiting the blood-soaked conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Viktor Portel’s harrowing documentary follows Vladimír Dzuro, a Czech investigator committed to bringing war criminals to justice. Drawing from Dzuro’s bestselling book The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War, the film primarily focuses on the atrocities committed by Serbian forces; as Dzuro returns to sites of torture and death, his encounters with the survivors as well as supporters of the perpetrators are at once riveting and heartbreaking.

The Vukovar massacre, one of the most infamous incidents of the war, is recounted in eye-opening detail. In 1991, in the final days of a battle between the Croatian National Guard and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) during the Croatian war of independence, the latter vetoed an agreement to evacuate the Vukovar hospital and turned it over to Serbian paramilitaries. In the end, nearly 300 people were executed in cold blood and dumped in mass graves. In 1996, Dzuro was a part of a mission to exhume the victims. Flickering archival footage of the campaign shows piles of bodies laid beneath the ground, a chilling visual manifestation of how history can be buried and erased. In contrast with the lo-fi quality of these newsreels, contemporary footage of Dzuro has the stylisation of a crime thriller. The look creates a gripping atmosphere, even if it also occasionally verges on overdramatisation, which the film’s already shocking true stories don’t necessarily need.

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