Shores of Hope

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Audience Member Another GDR movie focussing on the Stasi. And not even a good one. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member German filmmakers continue their cinematic examination of the years of Cold War division in Torke Constantin Hebbeln's Shores of Hope. Conny (Alexander Fehling) and Andreas (August Diehl, best known to English-speaking audiences as the dialect-discerning SS officer in the cellar bar in Inglourious Basterds) are two best friends who decide their best chance of a life away from the rigidity of East Germany is to become sailors in the port city of Rostock. However, this proves difficult in the paranoid political climate of 1980s East Germany, with Rostock its sole international port and those seeking jobs on ocean-going vessels treated with suspicion by the authorities. After three years of working on the docks, Conny and Andreas are given the opportunity to join a ship's crew, provided they work for the dreaded East German secret police, the Stasi. The pair are tasked with secretly recording conversations with their foreman who is suspected of planning to defect to the West. What ensues is a portrait of abject misery the East German state inflicted on its citizens, with friends torn between their loyalties to each other and to their own selfish desires. Shores of Hope is richly infused with a sense of period, of a regime that basically played a state-sanctioned country-sized game of Prisoner's Dilemma for over forty years. The Stasi and its omniscient influence is felt in every scene, subverting the autonomy of each character regardless whether they are of the state or agin it. While the film admirably attempts to reach the heights of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), it falls short, instead feeling like a slightly more melodramatic and conventional companion piece. Where Shores of Hope best succeeds is in providing a claustrophobic portrait of an omniscient regime that dominated an already demoralised people for decades. It is yet another successful entry in the German cinema's ongoing introspective examination of the hard years of the Cold War. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/18/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Shores of Hope

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