Shadow Over The Islands (film)

Schatten ber den Inseln Englishlanguage title Shadow Over The Islands is an East German blackandwhite film, directed by Otto Meyer. It was released in 1952.

At 1952, the East German film industry sank to the lowest point in its history. Due to increasing supervision by the Socialist Unity Party, manifested in the new DEFA Commission of the SEDs Politburo that oversaw the eponymous film studio, many productions were canceled or thoroughly censured to insure compliance with the states ideological line. DEFA produced only six films during 1952. Under the influence of the nascent Cold War, five of them contrasted the life in the Socialist Eastern Block with those in the West. Among those, four dealt with the subject directly, while Shadow Over The Islands was an allegory, using the setting of a Faroese village for presenting the same theme.Miera and Antonin Liehm cited Shadow over the Islands as an example to the East German films in which a positive hero always with workingclass background was confronted by a negative one, which was mostly a former Nazi or a representative of the West, and often both. They concluded that at the time, directors did not even try for anything than the simplest stories, filmed in the most straightforward ways. For instance... Shadow Over The Islands... Shows how capitalist merchants threaten the health of the people. Sylvia Kltzer shared this view, writing that the film was a typical example of the DEFA pictures produced during the early 1950s, with a schematic plot centered on an archetypical character with little depth. Author Udo Benzenhfer, on the contrary, commented that the picture was a realistic one, with many references to the broader issues of society. ........

Source: Wikipedia