Synopsis:
After WWII, Berlin lies in ruins. For Gustav, Willi and their friends the rubble provides an adventurous, dangerous playground. Especially for Gustav, it helps pass the time, as he longs for his father’s return from a POW camp. One day a stranger arrives, looking helpless and hopeless…

Gerhard Lamprecht built his reputation during the 1920s and ‘30s with films like Emil and the Detectives (1931, script Billy Wilder) and socially-critical Berlin films based on the drawings of Heinrich Zille. In Somewhere in Berlin—his first postwar film, made just months after the cessation of hostilities—he portrays the people of the shattered city with precision and psychological realism.

Press Comments:
Official Selection, 2005 Goldener Spatz German Children’s and Media Festival

Lamprecht’s film is more convincing than Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero [1948]… - Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen

DEFA’s early attempt to connect to the progressive tradition of children’s entertainment of the late Weimar Republic. - Marc Silberman, Framing the Fifties, Cinema in Divided Germany

An optimistic fairytale. – Ralf Schenk, film historian

You may also be interested in:
Blum Affair, The	Murderers Are among Us, The