Decomposition of The Soul
Directed by Nina Toussaint & Massimo Iannetta
Imagine being a German who resided in the eastern half of that country in the 20th century. After having endured a collapsed economy and two devastating wars — one of which saw your countrymen inflict horrible atrocities — you were liberated by the Red Army into a new nightmare. Of all the sycophantically lethal secret police forces that served the Soviet Union, it is generally acknowledged that East Germany’s Stasi was the most zealous.
Decomposition of the Soul is a comparatively dispassionate account of one corner of this horror. Set in a former GDR prison, the camera wanders around the now abandoned building, frozen in time, staring at its preserved objects as if waiting for them to offer explanations. Our guide is a former inmate who explains the architecture of his trauma, almost matter-of-factly. A woman, detained as her young baby was ill on the other side of the wall, remembers the minutiae and madness that characterized her time there… and stares blankly into space. In between their stories are the words of writer Jürgen Fuchs, a former inmate who describes the dull ache of confinement and its slow insidious effects. The cumulative effect is a devastating indictment of man’s worst instincts gone unchecked.
Opens February 7 at Film Forum
Decomposition of the Soul is a comparatively dispassionate account of one corner of this horror. Set in a former GDR prison, the camera wanders around the now abandoned building, frozen in time, staring at its preserved objects as if waiting for them to offer explanations. Our guide is a former inmate who explains the architecture of his trauma, almost matter-of-factly. A woman, detained as her young baby was ill on the other side of the wall, remembers the minutiae and madness that characterized her time there… and stares blankly into space. In between their stories are the words of writer Jürgen Fuchs, a former inmate who describes the dull ache of confinement and its slow insidious effects. The cumulative effect is a devastating indictment of man’s worst instincts gone unchecked.
Opens February 7 at Film Forum
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