Flight forward...
Video documentarists have emerged from the GDR following the unification of Germany. Before, no independent productions were tolerated, Video productions were realized only by East-German TV, the DEFA studio for documentary films and by a small number of independent amateurs. A big part of their documentarists and journalists, after their being dismissed, made the best of it and founded their own production groups. Differing from similar groupings in western Germany, these are realizing their own treatments and not primarily commissioned productions. There is a broad range of topics regarding the present time that are being treated in very personal ways. There are authors’ films, documentary essays, and documented events that ail maintain the tradition of East- German documentarists. The medium video is used as a technical possibility to produce documentaries. Individual works that explore the intrinsic properties of the medium are still hard to find. Based on an initiative by “Tele Potsdam ” and in cooperation with the East German TV-editors Sylvia Kauffeldt and Reinhard Griebner (DFF), the programme “THE WINDOW - filmmakers within the DFF" was founded making broadcasting time available to professionals and beginners who wanted to reach a bigger audience with their documentary or experimental works. “The idea worked... ”, as Lew Hohmann writes, “...an attempt to realize the self-supporting film for TV. This was made possible by the open-mindedness of the DFF and was stopped at least temporarily when the entire station was dismantled. At the same time, the end was a provocation to continue