Stasi, A State Against Its People

STASI - five letters associated with dictatorship, terror, violation of human rights and mass surveillance. Stasi is an acronym for the Staatssicherheit, the East German State security apparatus: 100,000 employees distributed across 16 regional offices, each with their own prisons, and almost 200,000 official informants recruited from the East German population. These figures are higher than for any other secret police system in the Soviet bloc. And yet these all-powerful secret services disappeared almost instantly following the fall of the Berlin Wall, more than 30 years ago. Nothing like the Stasi’s archives, and the transparency afforded by German government and society, have ever come to light before. They will play a key role in our film and allow us to develop various levels between the past and the present. Using new discoveries and original Stasi documents, we want to tell the story of the most effective secret service in the Communist bloc.