Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Wednesday 11 April 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Isabel Hilton talks to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, director of the widely praised The Lives of Others, winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign language film.
Set in the German Democratic Republic, the film portrays a Kafkaesque world where the secret police, the Stasi, infiltrate every aspect of people's lives. Whereas some recent films about life in the Communist East have been touched with nostalgia, The Lives of Others portrays a nightmare of surveillance.
She also reflects on the work of writer Primo Levi, 20 years after his death.
The statue of Eros, Piccadilly, London
© Musee Albert Kahn
The Statue of Eros, Piccadilly
Playlist
Isabel Hilton delves into the wit and whimsy of the author who won ecstatic praise from many fellow writers including Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess and James Joyce. As the comic novels of Flann O'Brien are re-issued, Isabel examines whether his work was unique in the English language as some claim.
Also on the programme Isabel looks at the legacy of the autochrome, the world's first practical system for taking colour photographs. She discusses a new television series about the French financier who dispatched teams across the world to take thousands of these autochromes between 1908 and 1930 and how these became a unique visual archive of everyday life and the momentous events of the early twentieth century - all in colour.
And Isabel meets German director and screenwriter Florian Henckel von Donnersmark to discuss the film that won the best Foreign language film at the Oscars this year for 'The Lives of Others', set in the former German Democratic Republic, where artists and writers tread a daily tightrope under the watchful eyes of the Stasi.
'The Best of Myles' by Flann O'Brien is published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics
'The Lives of Others' is on general release from Friday 13th April 2007
