This debut feature by writer-director von Donnersmarck, an engrossing thriller about the activities of the East German secret police in the Cold War era, created a sensation in Germany and was a hit at the Toronto film festival. Muhe plays a good soldier for the GDR's Stasi who starts losing his faith in oppression while spying on a successful dramatist and his actress lover (Koch and Gedeck). As the story progresses, it often suggests Orwell's 1984 in reverse‹here the hero becomes humanized rather than indoctrinated. "I thought of calling the film 1985, taking it one step further," von Donnersmarck says. "Because in a way that's what the GDR was, an Orwellian state taken to a weird level of reality." Muhe should know — he has claimed he was a victim of Stasi surveillance early in his career.