Günter Drescher
Two people love each other when they know they should not. Their parents' and friends' pleas, their social backgrounds and reputation, their careers; everything is used to make them give each other up. Flattery, lies and threats finally drive Frank to despair and Karin to treason. But it is not due to their parents' hatred, nor to any greed for inherited wealth. Rather, the mere conjecture expressed by the authorities is enough to set off a merciless mechanism.
A life-threatening heart attack confines Richard Roth to the hospital bed. There, Richard, who is in his late fifties, asks himself what will remain of him and his life. What happened to his four daughters? Do they take after him? How have they developed? His youngest daughter Nanny, who is still living with her father, gets her three other siblings to Weimar to visit their father.
Three couples want to spend a short break together. Some have a traffic accident, the others are prevented professionally. So the designer Robert and the youth helper Ellen are forced to spend the days in a remote farmhouse alone with her young son. The previously suppressed marriage crisis breaks open. Allegations, confessions, charges, self-accusations are in the room. Painfully, they come to the realization that only their own happiness is responsible for their happiness. With the old landlord, each of them finds himself. In the end, Robert and Ellen want to try a new beginning.
Soldier Ignaz Wolz returns from WWI with an immeasurable hatred of capitalist war profiteers. He decides to start his own revolution, but tries to stay away from the organized class struggle. He steals from the rich men and divides the wealth among the poor. One day, Wolz is arrested and sentenced to life in prison; seven years later he is released due to mass protests. More than ever, it is hard for him to fit in. He severs ties with his former companions, who reject his ideas, and leaves Germany.
Little Tim Tammer, the son of a lighthouse keeper, lives right on the Baltic Sea beach, but his remote home often leaves him feeling lonely. When Young Pioneers pitch their tents nearby, he is overjoyed and quickly makes new friends.
The Rabbit Is Me was made in 1965 to encourage discussion of the democratization of East German society. In it, a young student has an affair with a judge who once sentenced her brother for political reasons; she eventually confronts him with his opportunism and hypocrisy. It is a sardonic portrayal of the German Democratic Republic's judicial system and its social implications. The film was banned by officials as an anti-socialist, pessimistic and revisionist attack on the state. It henceforth lent its name to all the banned films of 1965, which became known as the "Rabbit Films." After its release in 1990, The Rabbit Is Me earned critical praise as one of the most important and courageous works ever made in East Germany. It was screened at The Museum of Modern Art in 2005 as part of the film series Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany.
