“Just as it was mandatory in British schools to attend Bible lessons, in Soviet Russia, Yugoslavia or East Germany, Marxism was a central part of the curriculum. I’d often wondered about this. What had happened to the Marxist teachers now?” Phil Collins’s project marxism today takes as its starting point the Marxism classes that were a compulsory feature of East German schools prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, investigating what became of the teachers of this subject after Marxist ideology became increasingly discredited. This film – the prologue of a larger project – focuses on three former teachers from the former German Democratic Republic. Combining interviews with these women with archive footage from the heyday of the socialist state, Collins’s film considers the ramifications of the social and political transformations of the past two decades from a human perspective. With a soundtrack by Nick Powell and Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab).
