Pour l'amour du peuple

Mr S. has spent twenty years working as an official “in the service of society”. He performs his duties out of love; unconditional, total love for “his people”. However, his is also a love that is blind and destructive.
But then, the wind changes, and the regime he works for comes to an end. Finding himself about to be made redundant, Mr S’s whole world collapses.
Bereft of his workplace – his one true home – he sees no future, no prospects. He sits alone in the office that will soon no longer belong to him. As soon as he goes through that door, that’ll be it. He won’t come back.
In February 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, the Ministry of State Security is disbanded. The Stasi has come to an end.
Major S. was one of the Ministry’s officers.
On his last day at work, he talks in detail about his life and the past twenty years he has spent working at the heart of this institution.
In Eyal Sivan’s and Audrey Maurion’s film, Mr S’s testimony serves as the background for a disturbing montage. His report is interwoven with unique original footage of the cellars of the ‘Gauck’ building, which housed the authority that dealt with the winding up of the Stasi, but also with images from various private and public archives.
A film about surveillance and blindness; about conviction and disillusionment.