Institute History
Description
Little Angel is the kind of distinctive filmmaking that leaves one enriched and moved, but also melancholy and even disturbed. It is at once a love story, a neorealist depiction of marginality, a tale of a crime, and an exploration of sanity, insanity, and human need.
Director Helke Misselwitz has fashioned a marvelous multifaceted story which depicts a woman, Ramona, who lives by herself near the Ostkreuz train station in East Berlin. She is hypersensitive with an almost compulsive fixation on the dark side of life, a state that has left her alone and isolated. She meets quite by chance a slightly roguish Pole, Andrej, who sells cigarettes on the black market. Their relationship surprisingly blooms, and Ramona finds herself in love. But perhaps inevitably, she cannot sustain her happiness and tragedy ensues. Susanne Lothar is absolutely superb as the woman full of contradictory desires that ultimately drive “little angel” to her destiny. Misselwitz demonstrates a dextrous capacity for richly realized drama that is hard to forget.