The Lives of Others (2007)

The life of someone else is always a mystery. To watch how a father is building sand castles with his little son, to drop in a visit to your neighbors, to observe an old man feeding the birds in the park and even more so to find out anything about lives of people – it's very interesting. Other people's secrets are always a matter of concern, it's so captivating to uncover them. In this film the producer raises a very interesting issue: when a person starts looking closely on how other people live, he finds an inner contradiction by understating that his own life is far less interesting. And this fact gives him a great motivation to start living better, richer life. And not for oneself only but for others, making their lives more colorful!

The events of The Lives of Others take place in East Berlin in 1984. Five years remain till the overthrow of the East German government, which is still struggling hard to hold on the power by ways of espionage, denunciation and having total control over people. Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a secret police officer, is an ambitious man who is longing to get a promotion as soon as possible. Famous playwright Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, a prominent actress, are Wiesler's target. What he has to do is to spy after them and inform about what they do and how they live. But as he immerses himself into the world of the victims under observation, he is gradually changing. When Wiesler comprehends what love is, finds out Dreyman's pains, he realizes what a miserable existence he has. Now he has discovered a completely different way of life, which was hard to resist to live. But to try it he had to confront the system he was involved in. Would he dare to set the ball rolling? The game full of risk and danger has started.

The Lives of Others won Oscar award in 2007 in the category "Best Foreign Language Film" Also this film got seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards, including best film, best screenplay, best director and best actor. The Lives of Others movie was nominated for 11 categories, this was a new record for a number of nominations, and this is just another fact that adds to the film. Overall, this record-holder can boast a great number of nominations that speak for it. With as low budget as only $2 million, it managed to gross more than $77 million worldwide.

The Lives of Others is in the list of the best movies of the decade and is among the greatest movies ever made. If you find William Buckley, an American author and commentator, a respectable person, then this was he who wrote in his column in the newspaper that after watching the movie he turned to his friend and said: "I think it's the best movie of all that I have seen." Meanwhile Jon Miller, an American sportscaster, has ranked this film #1 in his list of conservative movies for the last 25 years.