Directed by Jörg Hoppe, Heiko Lange and Klaus Maeck
92 minutes
In German and English, with English subtitles

Warning: This film contains sex scenes, violence, drug use and offensive language!

West Berlin in the 1980s was a hotbed of creativity, sex, music and chaos... a special lifestyle had been created by a very unique situation. Anyone who wanted to live without earning money (and also didn't want to join the army), could go to that divided heaven and live freely. Remember, this is when the infamous Berlin Wall was still in place, and it created an incredible energy that rippled throughout the city. Everyday life hadn't been commercialized yet, and the dark, wild side of life was explored to the max. I know, because I was there.

This is a documentary that throws itself headlong into that era, and collects together images and sounds from Berlin in its heyday. It has been described as a "documentary and a declaration of love rolled into one". I can understand that, because it was an extremely special time and place. In this film we have Blixa Bargeld skinny as a rake getting drunk in a local hangout, and Nick Cave being meditative in his Berlin flat. The avant-garde band DieTödliche Doris sing in a vast mud-hole called Potsdamer Platz, which today looks like a huge commercial shopping mall. Amid all this chaos is the bewildered and amazed Mancunian musician Mark Reeder who documents it. B-movie captures the young bohemians, the lowlifes, the artists and the decadents who all inter-dependently created Berlin into a cultural tour de force.

As one critic put it: "Everything was possible, nothing seemed forbidden in this island city in the middle of the GDR. In the last decade before the fall of the wall, West Berlin had become a centre for artists, squatters, subversive ideas, subcultures, drugs, trash, ugliness and passion."

This will be a high-definition screening of this rambunctious documentary.