What is the most difficult thing in life of an architect in the DDR? To resist the powerful authorities or to save his marriage?
The film Die Architekten brings us to the period right before the fall of the Berlin Wall and is a testimony of a young generation of architects in the former DDR. Although the director Peter Kahane intended the film to be a bitter exploration of an architecture’s life burdened by compromises and an image of the gloomy atmosphere of panel houses (similarly to Panelstory by Chytilová and maybe Kachyňa’s Dobré světlo), it was nearly outrun by the reality of the fall of the Wall. Typical DDR images and East Berlin as such gradually ceased to exist and the film almost lost its stage.