On November 9, 1989, following the opening of the borders, the first bricks that had served as a physical and ideological barrier since 1961, dividing the east and west of the city of Berlin for 28 years, were symbolically demolished. Three days before Christmas, the Brandenburg Gate opened its doors and with it the country’s entry into the capitalist market, with the eastern part adopting the western currency and bringing formal German reunification to an end in November 1990. The echoes of the end of the Cold War are also palpable in the film programme of the 38th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival, which is hosting the world premiere of the collective film Im Glanze dieses Glückes (In the Glow of Happiness) in the Zabaltegi section.

Produced by the collective Brick ins Land [A Look at the Country], composed of artists Tamara Trampe, Johann Feindt, Helga Reidemeister, Jeanine Meerapfel and Dieter Schumann, coming from both sides of the wall, the film records in real time the new direction of a country, but also the end of an era, allowing political rhetoric and, at times, humor to combine, alternating images of an auction of the Wall with confessions from members of the Stasi. Representing the collective, Helga Reidemeister from the FRG and Tamara Trampe from the GDR traveled to San Sebastián, immortalizing their critical thoughts on the reunification process in the official magazine of the film festival.

Taking as a reference Berthold Brecht’s phrase about artists taking the lead in any event, Trampe and Reidemeister defined their cultural collective with a spirit of unity that had allowed them, in times of uncertainty, to cross the symbolic barrier of the wall through their creations. Although they did not hesitate to show their rejection of the way in which the reunification process had taken place, ‘it was something like a clearance sale, as a small United States would have done’, both were enthusiastic about the possibility of a cinema that would not be affected by these forms of ‘absorption’. As a great repository of memories, the magazine also records the theoretical side of the group: an extract from the manifesto that the collective had drafted and which was published on the eve of the closing of the film festival.

Helga Reidemeister’s work covered music and trade union activism (Lokomotive Kreuzberg, 1975), the student movement and far-right militarisation (Aufrecht gehen. Rudi Dutschke-Spuren, 1980) and the internationalist Women in Black movement (Frauen in Schwarz, 1997), among others. For her part, Tamara Trampe addressed memory as the central theme of her work, with films such as Der schwarze Kasten (1992), Wiegenlieder (2010) and My Mother, a War and Me (2014), and diversified her artistic production, particularly in the field of dramaturgy, with more than fifty completed film and theatre projects. At the 1990 San Sebastian Film Festival, with wounds freshly reopened and a clear political and artistic commitment, two of the most essential voices in the field of documentary and militant cinema came together.