Comment by nrjames
1 day ago
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
1 day ago
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
They have the 2018 movie free to watch on Fandango At Home, which doesn't even require you to login to watch it: https://athome.fandango.com/content/browse/details/Balloon/1...
The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!
+1 to this! I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
> I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences.
The film The Lives of Others should give folks a pretty good idea of what the Stasi was.
Probably this is an also big component in the notorious German preference for cash over cards.
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The havoc that finding out your family and friends spied on you for benefits, can not be overstated. How deeply anti social and lonely such a divided and conquered socialist utopian society is can not be expressed in words, and yet it can.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesbeauftragter_f%C3%BCr_di...
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> Germany's strict privacy laws
Not anymore.
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It's interesting that this is a serious movie by the director Michael 'Bully' Herbig, who is generally known for bad taste comedies, full of clichees about race and sexuality.
+2, very nice movie. Might be very eye-opening for any some about what it was like under USSR umbrella...
+1, really well-done movie!
I watched Night Crossing in my german class in high school. I remember it being intense.
For the 80s it was intense yes. Watching it now that same tension feels milder but I guess that's because every single TV show now has to have constant explosions, car crashes etc in it.
There is actually gunfire in it and a teenager dies in the beginning but it still feels less intense due to the 80s pace IMO.
Great movie yes! The 1980s one, I have not seen the new one.
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I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.
If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!
I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652703)
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