Gundermann

An excavator operator who writes songs: Gerhard Gundermann is a poet, a lateral thinker and an idealist, who dreams and hopes and loves and fights, who spies on others and is spied on himself. Shortly before the end of the GDR, he works in open-cast lignite mining and releases his first records. With his bittersweet lyrics and songs about home, love and transience, he sings his way into the hearts of an ever-growing audience. When "Gundi" and his family could easily make a living from his music after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he doesn't want to give up his job as an excavator operator...

"Gundermann" is a love story and a music film, a story of repression and surrender. In his new feature, director Andreas Dresen succeeds like few others in making the extraordinary visible in the everyday life of his sibjects. He takes a fresh look at a country that has disappeared, and tells the story of the life of Gerhard "Gundi" Gundermann (1955 - 1998) with sensitivity, tenderness and humor, whose story and whose songs still make the soul resonate today - and never let one go.