Christel Bodenstein

Quote:
Der kleine Prinz (1966/1972) has been even more thoroughly buried by history than the rest of Wolf’s work, or the corpus of DEFA production in general. The reasons for this neglect are multiple on the one hand, the film got caught in the crossfire of the Eleventh Plenum, which took place during the shooting of the film. Although the project had been conceived of as a vehicle for the eventual launch of color TV in the GDR (an undertaking that was repeatedly started and stopped), Heinz Adamock (1921-2010), Intendant of the DFF from 1954 to 1989, sought to get out of his commitment to fund the film, until Albert Wilkening insisted he honor it.Read More »

Review by EastGermanCinema.com:
Many Britons of a certain age share a collective memory so firmly etched in their psyches that the very mention of it brings back childhood nightmares. In 1964, BBC television serialized a film about a haughty princess, a prince that turns into a bear, a giant goldfish, and a really, really evil dwarf. So powerful are the memories of this film, that thirty-eight years later BBC Radio 4 did a program on the film’s effect on an entire generation. The film was called The Singing Ringing Tree, and none of those children could have known that they were watching a film that was the product of East Germany.Read More »