AMD 5

Für diese AMD habe ich den Filme Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). It's a great movie and I would definitely recommend it. It takes place in the '80s in East Germany and is about a Stasi Captain who is hired to spy on a writer and his actress girlfriend because they are "suspicious." The Stasi Captain is a very lonely man and becomes obsessed with the lives of this writer and actress and grows to care for them. He does not report the writer to authorities when he and some friends write an article about suicide statistics in Germany, which have been hidden and kept private. This eventually costs him his job once the authorities find out. However, this film has an unexpectedly happy ending. A lot of other unhappy stuff happens, but the writer finds out about the Captain who was spying on them, and how he didn't report them, so when he writes a book, he dedicates it to the Captain. The last scene is the disgraced Captain walking into a bookstore, picking up the book and looking at the dedication page. It's oddly happy.

I understood quite a lot of German from this film. The actors were easy to understand and the dialogue was pretty straightforward, so no fancy or flowery language. If I had watched this without subtitles, I would have understood perhaps about a quarter or a third of the dialogue. There were words I knew in most of the dialogue, and there were a few full sentences that I understood.