East German westerns at the Speakeasy Cafe
by John Hartl
(The Seattle Times, October 11, 1996)

It's no longer a surprise to find October in Seattle crowded with all kinds of film festivals: Polish, Mexican, gay, retrospective, etc. But just when you think you've seen them all, here comes " Wild East Goes West," a collection of East German westerns that were filmed between 1966 and 1983 in Yugoslavia, Romania, the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Cuba and East Germany. Rarely shown outside Eastern Europe, they're set in the U.S. and attempt to deal with American history from a Native American perspective.

The series begins at 8 tonight at the Speakeasy Cafe with Josef Mach's " The Sons of the Great Bear," a sweeping 1965 production about the impact of white immigrants on Native American culture during the discovery of gold in western Dakota. (It gets a repeat showing at 8 p.m. Sunday.)

It will be followed at 10 tonight by a discussion with the movie's star, Gojko Mitic; "Northern Exposure's" Richard Restoule; the University of Washington's Maureen Schwarz; and a group of "East Germans of the 'Indian movie' generation." A videotape of the discussion, which will focus on the treatment of Native American history and culture in popular culture, will be shown at 10 p.m. Sunday.

The 11 o'clock movie tonight is Konrad Petzold's 1971 film, "Osceola," which deals with the deportation of Florida Indians to Oklahoma in the mid-1930s. Gottfried Kolditz's "Apaches,", which will be shown at 8 p.m. tomorrow and 11 p.m. Sunday, is a 1973 production about a young warrior, Ulzana, who survives a massacre and tracks down his tormentors.

Jens Wazel, a Microsoft employee who grew up in East Germany and organized the festival, claims he "didn't think in political terms when I was 7 years old in 1972 and saw my first Indian movie...(but for us the Indians were always the good guys, and in play, nobody wanted to be a cowboy, everybody wanted to be an Indian."

He tried to raise money for a festival for a couple of years, then got the backing from a German television production company that plans to make a documentary about the event. All films will be shown with English subtitles.