Natja Brunckhorst is the actor-turned-director who first came to prominence as the teen lead of Uli Edel’s Christiane F in 1981, playing a West Berlin drug addict and effectively co-starring with David Bowie, who had a cameo in the film. Now she has written and directed this satirical caper with an Ealingesque premise: a bunch of depressed people in East Germany in 1990, with reunification a few days away, discover an old storage depot with tons of abandoned and soon-to-be-worthless ostmarks – ostmarks galore, in fact – and not much time left for sneakily exchanging them for deutschemarks at the accepted (and humiliating) rate of two to one.
But how to explain this mountain of cash? Sandra Hüller plays a woman called Maren who, with husband Robert (Max Riemelt), leads the plan while Ronald Zehrfeld plays Volker, with whom Maren has some emotional history. Veteran player Peter Kurth brings his mighty presence to the role of Markowski, Robert’s glowering dad and disaffected state security guard working at the depot who puts them on to the scam.
