• What Would Happen If . . . ?

  • What Would Happen If . . . ?

  • The Uninvited Guest

  • Sunday, May 10, 2020

    7 PM (112 mins)
    BAMPFA



CANCELED: What Would Happen If . . . ?

(Was wäre, wenn . . . ?)

Gerhard Klingenberg
East Germany, 1960

All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

featuring

Trude Bechmann, Willi Narloch, Gerd Ehlers, Angela Brunner,

Released the year before the building of the Berlin Wall, the East German satire What Would Happen If . . . ? depicts the relocation of the village of Willshagen from East to West Germany. This black-and-white farce exposes the panic and greed of villagers adjusting to the fact that “the good old days” before cooperative farms may soon return. Like the accompanying short The Uninvited Guest, the film portrays the moral accommodation of socialist citizens to new bosses and borders.

Gabriel M. Paletz
FILM DETAILS 

Screenwriter

  • Hedda Zinner

Cinematographer

  • Erich Gusko

Language

  • German
  • with English subtitles

Print Info

  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 90 mins

Source

  • DEFA Film Library

Preceded By

The Uninvited Guest
(Nezvaný host)

Vlastimil Venclík, Czechoslovakia [Czech Republic], 1969

Produced at the Czech National Film School just months after the Warsaw Pact invasion, this dark-humored short shows a couple confront, then grow used to, a gruff intruder.

FILM DETAILS 

Language

  • Czech
  • with English subtitles

Print Info

  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 22 mins
source
  • Národní Filmový Archiv and State Cinematography Fund