Good Bye, Lenin!

East Berlin, October 1989. Alex's mother Christiane is a devoted socialist, a woman who threw herself into the system after her husband fled to the West. One evening she sees her son arrested at a protest, has a heart attack, and falls into a coma. While she is asleep, the Wall falls, and the GDR disappears. Eight months later she wakes up, and the doctors warn that any shock could kill her. So Alex decides that, inside her bedroom, the GDR will go on existing.

Wolfgang Becker turns this premise into a brilliant comedy: Alex hunting for old jars of Spreewald pickles that no one sells anymore, relabelling Western products, and making fake East German news broadcasts with a friend who dreams of being a film director. Daniel Brühl is wonderful as Alex, and Yann Tiersen's music gives everything a sweet, melancholy glow.

But the film is much more than a comedy. It is about a son's love for his mother, about the lies we tell to protect the people we love, and about a whole country that vanished overnight. Slowly Alex's fake GDR becomes the country he wished it had been. It is funny, tender and sad, and it says more about the reunification than many serious dramas. It won the European Film Award for Best Film. One of the great European films of its decade.