Little Angel
(Engelchen)
With Susanne Lothar, Cezary Pazura, Sophie Rois.
Germany, 1996, 35mm, color, 88 min.
German with English subtitles.
In her second feature film, Helke Misselwitz, who directed some of DEFA Studio’s most intriguing and sensitive documentaries, assembles a cast culled from Germany’s finest contemporary stage and film actors. Ramona Schneider, nicknamed "Little Angel" (Lothar), is a hypersensitive woman obsessed with the dark side of life who leads a lonely and inconspicuous existence in an apartment near the Ostkreuz train station in East Berlin. One day, through a grotesque coincidence, she meets the roguish and handsome Andrzej (Pazura), a Polish dealer of bootleg cigarettes with connections to Berlin’s underworld. The two fall in love and, for a short time, Ramona’s gloom begins to lift before a tragic descent from the heights of her unexpected happiness intervenes.