Uferfrauen - Lesbian life and love in the GDR
Co-sponsored by:
Goethe-Institut Boston
Gender and Sexuality Center (GSC)
Mandel Center for the Humanities
About the Film
Documentary, Germany · 2020
DCP, 1h 55m
German with English subtitles
Six lesbians who created a private world for themselves despite state
repression speak out about life behind the Wall in East Germany. Through
intimate romances and lives as mothers and workers, these women, from both
rural and metropolitan areas, found a way to exist.
Uferfrauen conveys the omnipresent feeling of loneliness as an outsider, the
social taboo of homosexuality, the compulsion to conform and adapt in a
repressive state - a life on the (private) fringes of society, always in personal
conflict, risking the jump into the deep end or staying on the safe shore.
Despite their differences, the protagonists were all pursuing the same goal: the
search for personal (love) happiness.
Nominated for the Grimme Prize 2022 - Information & Culture Competition
Audience Award at the 2019 Hamburg Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
About the Speaker
Barbara Wallbraun is an East German, Leipzig-based filmmaker, media teacher and moderator of film events and workshops. After seven years of work, her debut feature-length documentary „Uferfrauen - Lesbian life and love in the GDR” premiered in 2019 and travelled the world. Due to COVID-restrictions this is her first in person visit in the USA.