Review: Karl Marx City, 2016, dir. Petra Epperlein

Who needs to go to the Toronto International Film Festival when you can just watch movies in competition remotely? Okay, fair answer: Me. I need to go. But I can’t, or I couldn’t, so instead my very awesome editors over at The Playlist gifted me with screeners, thus allowing me to be “part” of TIFF without the travel thing, and the “meeting my online contacts and peers in person, thus turning them into real human beings in my experience” thing. Good enough. For now.

Anyways: Karl Marx City, the first of these, is pretty dang good. My fingers hurt from typing, so I’ll keep this brief: It’s about the filmmaker Petra Epperlein’s journey through her past, and her attempt to either prove or disprove her father’s involvement with the Stasi back during the days of East Germany’s tenure. I liked it. It’s harsh, smart, and really well made. But instead of writing a big ol’ thing here, I’m just going to direct you to that there review that I wrote, which gets the point across much better than this paragraph does.