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New Beginnings

In Konrad Wolf's East German film Solo Sunny (1980), Ingrid "Sunny" Sommer (played by the incredible Renate Krößner) finds herself traveling, sometimes by walking, car, or train through the cities of and countrysides of East Germany. These scenes not only convey Sunny's POV as she moves from Point A to Point B, but they also hint at her sense of personal and emotional isolation, as she goes from place to place, trying to find success as a singer-songwriter. She is also a young woman trying to find love and affection within the confines of the Soviet Union-occupied sect of Germany in the late 1970s/early 1980s. All of this before the Berlin Wall finally came down on November 9th, 1989, along with the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Solo Sunny provided young German audiences with a more independent, assertive, and relatable female protagonist whom they could relate to in contrast to the female characters in Frauenschicksale (translated to English as Destinies of Women), the 1952 propaganda film from nearly three decades prior.


Solo Sunny's director Konrad Wolf was known for making films that seemed to commit to "the building of a Communist society and culture in East Germany", and tackling controversial topics like uranium mining during the Cold War in Sonnensucher (translated to English as Sun Seekers) (1958), as well as the negative impact the Berlin Wall had on German society in Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven) (1964). Solo Sunny was, for all intents and purposes, a reaction to the division and isolation felt by people on both sides of the Wall, as well as a statement on the definition of an independent woman, with Sunny's rebellious and brutally honest public persona yet emotionally involved and lonely character. The fact that this movie was also Wolf's final completed film before his passing in 1982 at the age of 56 makes this statement an extra powerful one.


Three scenes from Solo Sunny are the movie's emotionally resonant ones, and they are the scenes mentioned at the beginning of this review that involves Sunny traveling. Said scenes are accompanied by a slowed-down rendition of the movie's theme music, which gives the audience a bittersweet reminder of Sunny's origins as a performer for a small band called the Tornadoes. It also indicates that she is slowly becoming unhappy with her old life, full of unsuccessful relationships and poor self-care. The mise-en-scene in these scenes consist of primarily dull and gloomy colors such as greys, whites, and blacks, which inhabit the forms of concrete buildings, and mist covering up the horizons for a road and a stretch of railway tracks, metaphorically implying that Sunny's future is so far unknown. Still, she will need to keep moving forward to see if her dreams of a better life will come true. This metaphor would apply to Germany as a whole because with the Berlin Wall dividing the country (both socially and politically), the country's future seemed as unpredictable as Sunny's character. In that, they were both uncertain about the road ahead but determined never to stop trying to find opportunity elsewhere and potentially break down barriers no matter what it took to get there along the way.

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