Masserberg (2010)

Set in everyday life in East Germany, the film is mainly about 19-year-old Melanie Tauber, known as Mel. Because of glaucoma, she is staying alongside many older women with eye conditions at the Masserberg Eye Clinic, an outlying department of Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Before the events depicted in the film, she and her brother had devised plans to escape to West Germany by hot-air balloon. With her conspicuous clothes and makeup, she defies the dreary routine of the clinic. The married doctor treating her, Carlo Sanchez, a Cuban, catches her attention. The two gradually begin an affair. His marriage is in crisis, and a child is on the way. As the story progresses, the film portrays the bureaucratic arbitrariness of East German medicine. Melanie feels sympathy for her older roommates. She is deeply disappointed when, despite a professor’s recommendation, an alternative treatment is not implemented. During this period of disappointment, Carlo and Mel also become sexually involved, while his wife is at home alone, struggling with labor pains. Carlo’s wife tells him that she can no longer have children. On his way home, an informant for the Stasi intercepts him. The informant tries to persuade Carlo to spy on Mel and her friends in the opposition movement. A “questioning” by the “bureaucratic” chief physician follows after a roughly ten-year-old patient writes a mocking poem, but it has no further consequences. At their next secret meeting, however, Carlo tells Mel that she has syphilis and is also pregnant by him. Shortly afterward, Mel discovers that her diary is missing. Carlo’s wife has meanwhile found out about the affair. At the next meeting between the informant and Sanchez, the latter shoves Mel’s diary in his face. A patient about Mel’s age, who apparently stole Mel’s diary from her bedside table and must have handed it over to the Stasi, suggests ways Mel might escape her difficult predicament, such as going to the police. Mel refuses because she cannot betray her friends. Carlo is admitted to hospital after a heart attack. There, the “rivals,” who differ in age, come face to face. The ophthalmologist dies despite attempts to save him. Mel tries to strangle the fellow patient who informed on her, but two of her friends stop her. They drag Mel into a Trabant. The three flee to West Germany through a border crossing weakened by construction work. In the brief epilogue, set after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the now-blind Mel visits the Masserberg Eye Clinic with her roughly ten-year-old son. She tells the boy that he was “conceived” there.