A fascinating footnote in mid-20th-century German history gets an expectedly worthy treatment by writer-director Lars Kraume in “The Silent Revolution,” one of those deeply respectful historical fictionalizations where the good people are allowed character development and the bad people largely remain very, very bad.
Set in 1956 when a senior classroom of East German high schoolers subversively held a two-minute silence for those just killed in the Hungarian Revolution, the film sticks to a classic mainstream retelling (roughly based on the memoir of one of the participants) where the only unforeseen element is an odd Christian overlay.
Box office in Germany and Austria will likely be strong, but apart from some continental European distribution, it’s hard to see this getting any kind of international traction.Helpful text at the start reminds audiences that the film is set five years before the Berlin Wall went up, at a time when it was still possible for East Germans
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