West German filmmaker Helke Sander had made several short films before directing her debut feature, Redupers (the shortened version of the title); she was also a leading figure in the Berlin feminist movement and editor of the journal Frauen und Film. Redupers--whose full title takes a sardonic jab at the East Berlin radio shibboleth, “the all-around realized Socialist personality"--is a portrait of a woman, Edda, played by Sander herself, and of a city, Berlin. Edda is a free-lance photojournalist living in West Berlin with her child. Between career and home, she has no time to conceive of, let alone do, work that means something to her. When she joins with a group of women photographers working on a government grant to photograph Berlin, she begins to focus on issues beyond the “women's issues” the sponsors expect. What she comes up with is a disturbing vision of a city cut in two--reduced, like her own personality, by the walls that divide and surround it.
Amy Taubin writes in the Soho News: “The film is intelligent and very fine...and never simplistic. The episodic structure and complex layering of sound and image are not only aesthetic choices but are choices suited to the life of the heroine. Edda's circumstances don't allow her the luxury of doing one thing at a time.... The film embodies the contradictions and the dialectics of Edda's life. It begins with the everyday, attempts to analyze it, to discover what is important in it. It is in this way an extraordinary film.”