Good Bye, Lenin!
All actors and roles (10)
All team (45)
Short description
East Berlin, shortly before the Wall comes down: Christiane Kerner, a committed socialist, falls into a coma after suffering a heart attack when her son Alexander is arrested at a protest against the state. By the time she wakes, eight months have passed, the Wall has fallen and the country she believed in no longer exists. Because her heart is weak and any shock could be dangerous, Alexander decides to hide the truth from her. With help from his sister Ariane, his friends and their neighbours, he turns the family flat into a small bubble of the old East, and goes as far as producing his own fake television news so that his mother believes the German Democratic Republic is still going. Keeping the illusion alive becomes harder as the world outside changes.
Wolfgang Becker directed and co-wrote the film with Bernd Lichtenberg and Hendrik Handloegten; it is the earlier of the two features he directed that are listed here, followed by Berlin Hero. Daniel Brühl plays Alexander, with Katrin Sass as Christiane, Chulpan Khamatova as Lara, Maria Simon as Ariane, Florian Lukas as Denis and Alexander Beyer as Rainer. The production, made in Germany, cost about 5 million dollars and took roughly 79 million dollars worldwide, a strong return for its budget. On IMDb it holds 7.7/10 from around 159,000 votes and on TMDB 7.5/10 from roughly 2,700 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 7.6/10 from 108 reviews, close to the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Denis Domashke (Florian Lukas) wears a t-shirt with the green code from 'The Matrix' (1999), even though the film's action takes place in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- Most of the film's scenes were shot in Berlin on Karl-Marx-Allee and around prefabricated buildings near Alexanderplatz.
- During filming at the hospital, a thermometer broke. All the mercury spilled out. Blood tests were taken from everyone present, which showed elevated mercury levels. However, it turned out that this was due to sushi eaten by the crew the day before the accident.
- The boy who played Alex as a child was also fond of building model rockets, so filming the rocket launch scene wasn't particularly difficult.
- Although products that existed in the GDR are depicted with historical accuracy in the film, the packaging of products from West Germany does not match what they actually looked like at the time, for example, Heinz ketchup, Pepsi Light, and Coca-Cola Light.
- The film features the West Berlin office of Coca-Cola, which previously 'starred' in Billy Wilder's comedy, 'One, Two, Three' (1961).
- At one point in the film, the song 'I Believe' by Zhanna Aguzarova is heard on the radio.
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