Comment by nrjames
21 days 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.
21 days 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.
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.
Probably this is an also big component in the notorious German preference for cash over cards.
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> 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.
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.
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...
I watched it on Kanopy last night, free but you have to log in with a library card. The fandango link above asked for $2.99.
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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