• What Would Happen If . . . ?
  • What Would Happen If . . . ?
  • The Uninvited Guest

What Would Happen If . . . ?

(Was wäre, wenn . . . ?)

featuring

Trude Bechmann, Willi Narloch, Gerd Ehlers, Angela Brunner,

Released the year before the building of the Berlin Wall, the East German satire What Would Happen If . . . ? depicts the relocation of the village of Willshagen from East to West Germany. This black-and-white farce exposes the panic and greed of villagers adjusting to the fact that “the good old days” before cooperative farms may soon return. Like the accompanying short The Uninvited Guest, the film portrays the moral accommodation of socialist citizens to new bosses and borders.

Gabriel M. Paletz
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Hedda Zinner
Cinematographer
  • Erich Gusko
Language
  • German
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 90 mins
Source
  • DEFA Film Library
Preceded By

The Uninvited Guest
(Nezvaný host)

Vlastimil Venclík, Czechoslovakia [Czech Republic], 1969

Produced at the Czech National Film School just months after the Warsaw Pact invasion, this dark-humored short shows a couple confront, then grow used to, a gruff intruder.

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • Czech
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 22 mins
source
  • Národní Filmový Archiv and State Cinematography Fund