Ostkreuz is set in naked Berlin just after the Iron Curtain fell. Klier shot his film on gloomy locations in the former East of the city in the old neighbourhoods of the former West and in the even gloomier areas of no-man’s-land in between. The film doesn’t mention the Wall, the protagonists only talk about ‘those days’ about which no one wants to be reminded. And there is a present, a new life and new laws.The main characters in Ostkreuz are the poor inhabitants of the former East. Not only Germans, but also migrants from other ex-Eastern Block countries. The way in which the film is made is reminiscent of the the phenomenal Germania Anno Zero by Roberto Rossellini. Rossellini came to Berlin in 1945 and shot a feature film among the ruins, about a poor family which could barely survive in the new era.Klier’s protagonist is a child, as it was for Rossellini. Not a boy this time, but a girl: Elfi. She is so upset by the money problems of her mother, chilled by circumstance, that she does anything to get money. This brings her into the milieu of black-marketeers and criminals formed by the desperate migrants.With his grimly told and beautifully sad story about Elfi’s roamings through the Berlin underworld, Klier has recorded a life for which television pictures are too rapid and too volatile. Within a completely different cinematographic idiom, Jean-Luc Godard undertook a comparable stunt with Allemagne Neuf Zero.
