The homecoming

>> Schönemann's Locked Up Time takes her East

by JOANNE LATIMER

"Filmmakers were pressed to lie," recalls Sibylle Schönemann, about the state-controlled DEFA film studio in old East Germany. "It was a shock, because there was [ideological] freedom at film school. Now I think that freedom at school was a test, to see what filmmakers were thinking."

Schönemann, whose film proposals were systematically rejected by the DEFA, applied for an exit permit in 1984 in hopes that her family could relocate to West Germany. Eventually, they did--but only after 12 months in jail and separation from her kids. Schönemann made a documentary about her ordeal called Locked Up Time and will be answering questions after screenings at the Goethe Institut next week.

"There were endless compromises to making films in East Germany. We knew our film audience in the East and what it was necessary to make, but that wasn't always allowed. They'd ask, 'Why do you want to make a film about alcoholism?'" says Schönemann. "Students informed on their colleagues, as did unofficial cooperators with falsified names. My [secret police] file proves that they were experimenting with how to construct a case against a filmmaker. My husband and I were made an example of to other filmmakers."

The Schönemanns were thrown in the clink, leaving two little girls in the hands of relatives. Deported in 1985, Sibylle decided to go back to East Germany and make a documentary to confront her oppressors when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989.

"Can you imagine? All these people, including many from the Stasi [secret police], were flooding through the checkpoint into West Germany. There I was, going the opposite way, back into the East with my daughter. I didn't really know I was home until I could smell the stale potatoes," laughs Schönemann, now 46 years old with grown children.

In Locked Up Time, a black and white film, she directly confronts (ex-) state officials and functionaries. She returns to the prison with her cellmate, then hunts down her judge, the investigating officers, the director of the DEFA studio and the sympathetic lawyer who arranged for her and her husband's eventual release.

And what did this refugee from the DEFA think of the film industry of Western Europe at the time? "The West seemed overfed with all kind of films--all kinds of everything--and it was more strange than we could've imagined. But we were used to it by the time our colleagues came in 1989. They had a very tough time." Schönemann is now organizing a film festival in eastern Germany and working on her next documentary.

Locked Up Time screens Thursday, Jan. 21 at 8pm, and Friday, Jan. 22 at 6:30pm and 8:30pm, at the Goethe Institut (418 Sherbrooke E.), $4