Directed By Nina Toussaint & Massimo Iannetta

“Transfixing! The filmmaking achieves a pure, unsentimental tension that serves its subject fully.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out NY

“A hushed, poetic meditation on the life of Stasi prisoners.”
– David Edelstein, New York Magazine

“A jolting, draining immersion in realpolitik gone amok. It’s a must-see!”
– Jay Carr, amNY

“A vivid, harrowing testimony from a bare minimum of visual evidence.” – Michael Joshua Rowin, indieWIRE
“The first essential documentary of the new year! This spellbinding account of life inside a former GDR prison connects to the existential themes of NIGHT AND FOG and A MAN ESCAPED.”
– Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

“Of all the sychophantically lethal secret police forces that served the Soviet Union, it is generally acknowledged that East Germany’s Stasi was the most zealous... Writer Jürgen Fuchs, a former inmate, describes the dull ache of confinement and its slow insidious effects. The cumulative effect is a devastating indictment of man’s worst instincts gone unchecked.”
– Jason Bogdaneris, The L Magazine

“Orwellian to the core, simultaneously dated and eerily futuristic both in visuals and subjects. A trove of painstaking detail. The film’s most unnerving quality is its quiet demonstration of the after effects of torture outside the prison.”
– Irina Ivanova, The Indypendent

The East German Secret Police, the Stasi, had 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants (one in 50 citizens were collaborators). As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, panicking Stasi attempted to destroy millions of pages of documents. However, they couldn’t destroy the recollections of their victims. THE DECOMPOSITION OF THE SOUL records the experiences of two former prisoners, each of whom describes in amazing detail the intricacies of their tormentors’ techniques. The world according to Orwell and Kafka.

Belgium • 2003 • 82 mins. • In German with English Subtitles

© Massimo Iannetta