From Marks and Spencer to Marx and Engels : a transnational DEFA and Amber Film documentary project across the Iron Curtain

This article looks at a noteworthy cooperation that took place between the Amber Film Collective – an independent production film group that has been based in the north-east of England for nearly thirty years – and Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) – the state-controlled national film production company of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In the late 1980s, film-makers from Amber and DEFA initiated an exchange, by which a production team from the other country would make a documentary film about the northern English city of Newcastle upon Tyne and the East German seaport of Rostock.