an afternoon at the cinema

We watched this extraordinary film this afternoon. East Berlin before the fall of the wall. Desperate lives lived in dark times. Redeeming decisions. Life, death, everything in between. A brilliantly realized idea of life closely observed by those not living it. Uplifting, scary, shocking. At the end, when the Stasi officer is confronted with the dedicatory words of the novel written by the subject of his surveillance, his grasp of the extent of his transformation is breathtaking.