Berlin Wall Movies & Films

An Oscar-winning drama about a Stasi officer who begins to question the surveillance state after monitoring a playwright and his girlfriend in 1984 East Berlin.

An acclaimed ARD television saga tracing two East Berlin families, one loyal to the regime and one dissident, through the 1980s to the fall of the Wall, bound together by a forbidden love.

Billy Wilder’s rapid-fire Cold War comedy was filmed at the Brandenburg Gate just weeks before the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961.

Acclaimed TV series following an East German spy sent undercover in West Germany across three seasons spanning the final years of the Cold War.

Wim Wenders’ poetic masterpiece follows two angels watching over a still-divided West Berlin in 1987, one of whom longs to become human and fall in love.

A beloved German comedy-drama about a young man who creates an elaborate illusion that the GDR still exists to protect his bedridden mother after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Steven Spielberg’s Cold War thriller follows lawyer James Donovan as he negotiates the exchange of captured spies on Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge.

Oscar-nominated documentary short about the colony of wild rabbits that thrived in the no-man’s-land of the Berlin Wall’s death strip.

Martin Ritt’s bleak adaptation of John le Carre’s novel stars Richard Burton as a burned-out British agent sent on one final mission to East Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie.

Michael Herbig’s gripping drama tells the true story of two East German families who built a homemade hot air balloon to escape over the inner-German border in 1979.

Christian Petzold’s quietly tense drama follows an East Berlin doctor banished to a provincial clinic after applying to leave the GDR, as she secretly plans her escape to the West.

A laid-back Kreuzberg bartender drifts toward his 30th birthday in the autumn of 1989, oblivious that the Berlin Wall is about to fall, in this much-loved adaptation of Sven Regener’s novel.

A German TV film dramatizing the true story of Tunnel 29, dug beneath the Berlin Wall in 1962 to smuggle 29 people from East to West Berlin.

A bittersweet comedy-drama about the bewildered East German border guards at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing, the place where the Berlin Wall first opened on the night of 9 November 1989.

Volker Schlöndorff’s drama follows a West German radical who is given a new identity in East Germany by the Stasi, only to watch her refuge crumble as the GDR collapses.

Michael Caine returns as spy Harry Palmer, sent to a divided Berlin to arrange the defection of a Soviet colonel in this gritty 1966 Cold War thriller that opens with a staged escape over the Wall.

Disney’s dramatization of the true story of two East German families who escaped to the West in a homemade hot air balloon in 1979.

Charlize Theron plays a lethal MI6 agent sent to Berlin in the final days before the Wall falls, hunting a list of double agents amid the chaos of November 1989.

A German comedy about teenagers growing up on the shorter, East German end of a Berlin street divided by the Wall, navigating first love, music, and state repression.

Carol Reed’s atmospheric Cold War noir captures post-war Berlin’s divided landscape as a British woman becomes entangled with a mysterious figure operating between the city’s sectors.

Margarethe von Trotta’s drama follows two young lovers separated on the night the Berlin Wall goes up in 1961, whose lives intertwine across the next 28 years until the fall.

A West German woman and a young East German border guard fall in love across the divide in 1989, drawing the suspicion of the Stasi, in this gentle romantic comedy set in the Wall’s final months.

ZDF/Netflix miniseries about an East German honey-trap spy who seduces a West Berlin woman working at a British intelligence listening station.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Cold War thriller stars Paul Newman as an American physicist who fakes a defection to East Germany to steal a secret anti-missile formula.

An East German woman and her young son cross to the West and land in the Marienfelde refugee transit camp, where suspicion and interrogation follow them in Christian Schwochow’s tense 2013 drama.

A tragicomedy about an East German who crosses the Wall again and again, never quite at home on either side, based on Peter Schneider’s novella The Wall Jumper.

A laconic American agent is sent to 1960s West Berlin to infiltrate a neo-Nazi network, in a cerebral Cold War thriller scripted by Harold Pinter and filmed on location in the divided city.

Based on the real 1962 tunnel escape, this early Cold War thriller dramatizes one of the most daring underground escapes from East Berlin.

When two East Germans hijack a plane to escape to the West, an American judge in Berlin must decide whether their flight from tyranny justified the crime, in a courtroom drama based on a true case.

A naive young British engineer is drawn into a real Anglo-American spy tunnel under 1950s Berlin, and into a doomed love affair, in John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel.