Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign film of 2006.  Set in 1984 in East Berlin, five years before the fall of the wall, this film explores the impact on an East German secret police official of spying on a young artistic couple suspected of treason.  “The Lives of Others” works beautifully, both as a social and psychological drama and as a taut, tightly wired thriller.” – Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune.  “….supremely intelligent, unfailingly honest movie.”  A. O. Scott, New York Times.  Written and Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

  Issues to ponder: Listening in on the lives of others – what kind of person would have a job like that? What is the impact of the observed on the observer?  How does inhumanity and humanity intersect at the margin and how does one become the other? What is the interplay between the demands of the state and of the individual?  What are the psychodynamics of empathy and how is it fostered?

Panelists:
Academic: Bruce Russell, Ph.D.
Film Scholar: Kirsten Thompson, Ph.D.
Psychotherapist: Loretta Polish, Ph.D.

Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute
32841 Middlebelt
Farmington Hills, MI 48334

Film at 1 p.m.
Discussion at 3:15 p.m.