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BERLINALE 2008 Panorama / Germany

Leipzig beauties chronicle bygone era

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Yesterday, German audiences at the Berlinale once again showed their enthusiasm for local productions, and in particular documentaries, that explore aspects of recent German history.

Gunther Scholz’s The Beauties From Leipzig had its first screening before a packed auditorium.

The documentary is based on an original premise: Scholz wanted to accompany the photographer Gerhard Gäbler and meet the nine Miss Leipzig 1989 candidates – whom the artist had immortalised in photos and audio cassette recordings at the time – and ask them to pose once more.

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Far from being vacuous beauties, these Eastern German women - who are now forty years of age - bear witness to an era and the changes that have since taken place. Moreover, most of them had only taken part in the beauty contest in order to escape, if only for a short time, from the precariousness of life in the GDR.

Among the women is a nurse, a worker in a thermal power station, an employee in a savoury biscuit factory, a tram driver and the leader of a socialist faction. Some of them have remained in Leipzig and continue to lead simple lives (for those born in Eastern Germany certainly know how to appreciate life’s simpler pleasures); others have moved to Berlin, Dubai or Africa to find better paid work as an interior decorator or director of a public relations agency.

They nonetheless remember the difficult times and recall this period with a sense of humour that won over Berlin audiences, who greatly enjoyed the details that combine the personal and the historical, such as the Eastern German swimming costumes that never dried out and the fashions of the time.

One of the protagonists, looking at a photo of herself at 20 and smiling as she remembers that she entered the Miss Leipzig contest with hairy legs, prompted peals of laughter with the following comment: "I asked myself 'why should I shave my legs?!', and then the GDR collapsed!".

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(Translated from French)

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