Michael Tucker often serves as the director of photography on the documentaries he co-directs with his wife and creative partner, Petra Epperlein, but he has an unusual co-cinematographer on their latest project: the dreaded East German Stasi. Archival surveillance footage from the old days of socialism eerily supplement and illustrate Epperlein’s painful family history in “Karl Marx City,” which screens at New York’s Film Forum.
Although she came from a loving family, Epperlein finds it hard to feel nostalgic for her childhood in what was then called Karl-Marx-Stadt. The city changed its name back to Chemnitz as soon as it could in 1990, but the painful legacy would live on, especially for her parents.
'Karl Marx City' offers an absolutely fascinating look into lives of relatively average German Democratic Republic citizens.
