Set in the no-man’s-land between East and West Berlin after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Ostkreutz tells the episodic story of 15-year-old Elfie, who does anything to get money. This leads her to the Berlin underworld, in the milieu of black-marketeers and criminals formed by desperate migrants.

Shot two years after the fall of the Wall in the gloomy Berlin of the Wende years, Michael Klier’s fiction adopts neorealist approaches to portray the impact of the opening of the borders between East and West. With hints of Rossellini—but 45 years later—Ostkreutz is a testament of a time and place.