A film by Anders Østergaard & Erzsébet Rácz
Denmark 2014

From the team of Oscar-nominated BURMA VJ, ’1989’ is a high-politics drama about the collapse of the Iron Curtain. A young and unknown technocrat, Miklós Neméth, is brought in to become Hungary’s new prime minister. He is to save the country’s appalling economy and soon decides to remove the massive – and expensive – border control apparatus from the state budget. He soon finds out that this decision sets him up against formidable adversaries and communist hardliners.

In the meantime, a young couple from East Germany is encouraged by the rumours that the Hungarian border to Austria will be opened for a few days to allow for the Pan-European picnic. Like thousands of other East Germans, they decide to make a go for it, but they are caught up in the political power-game that plays out behind closed doors in the Eastern Bloc. They young man is shot dead at the border, a tragic event that paradoxically accelerates Nemeth’s final decision to open the borders, and soon after the Berlin wall falls.

Anders Østergaard and Erzsébet Rácz recreate the events of 1989 and invite the audience into the secret meeting rooms through a mixture of ’testimonials’, archive material, recreation, and reconstructed dialogues lip-synch’ed to archive footage of the real political key characters.





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