The “Red Orchestra” Anti-Nazi Group in Berlin, 1933-1942
Film Screening and Discussion with Director Stefan Roloff, Berlin (Germany)

Join film director Stefan Roloff in conversation with Rachel Stern about the The Red Orchestra, a Berlin-based resistance group that fought against the Nazis from 1933 to 1942. A special focus will be artist Rainer Küchenmeister (1926-2010), who became a painter while incarcerated at the age of sixteen, inspired by a fellow female inmate and resister who was later beheaded. After the war his work was shown at documenta among other venues.

Between January 21 and 29, you can view The Red Orchestra on your home device.

WATCH THE TRAILER:

The Red Orchestra (2003) is a documentary by Stefan Roloff about a Berlin-based anti-Nazi resistance group that operated during WWII, using interviews with survivors and their children, and pioneering animation to tell their story. The film reveals how this diverse network of citizens, including communists, social democrats, and others, worked to undermine the Third Reich by distributing propaganda and gathering intelligence, despite being labeled traitors by the Gestapo and later the Allies. It highlights their efforts to fight Hitler and corrects the historical record, which has only recently recognized them as a significant resistance movement.
The film was nominated for Best Foreign Film, Women Film Critics Circle.

Stefan Roloff is an independent artist and filmmaker working in Berlin and New York. In 1984, he was invited to experiment on prototypes of digital video and imaging computers at the New York Institute of Technology where he produced videos with Peter Gabriel and Suicide. He received a 1989 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts for his pioneering digital work, which has been shown world-wide in museums and galleries. In 1997 he began work on his second documentary film “The Red Orchestra,” a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter against the Nazis, which was nominated best foreign film 2005 by the Women Critics Circle. For some years the subject of resistance remained a driving force in Stefan Roloff’s work. He created video-portraits of 80 dissidents from former Communist East Germany, resulting in a series of installations. Among other works he is currently working on a project about the smashing of monuments and a graphic novel-style feature about the Red Orchestra.

This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”