Hacker Cinema
Night Crossing
1982 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Delbert Mann
Two men want to escape from East Germany (under Communist rule) but they will only go if they can take their families with them. Based on a true story.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
Where to watch
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7 comments on Hacker News
Yes the movie Night Crossing also shows very well that there was a lot of suspicion, for example they had to buy the fabric from lots of different places and this a slipup actually caused them to be ratted out (not sure if this particular part of the story happened to these people in real life too but it was really a thing)
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
Balloon (2018) is really well done. Even though I had already seen the old Disney movie, Night Crossing (1982), the new movie was still suspenseful.
> it is well known that things like Disney/Hollywood movies (that were still circulating in a sort of samizdat way) and mundane consumer products like Coca-Cola or Levi's did a lot more at bringing the Wall down than the entire US nuclear arsenal.
Interesting. As a young kid in the early 80's (USA), I remember going to a Disney movie with my mom and brothers called "Night Crossing," which was about a family in East Germany escaping to West Germany via a hot air balloon in the middle of the night that they constructed. Being less than 10, I had no clue what was going on in Europe or the effects of post-WW2, but that movie sure stuck with me even to this day. It prompted many healthy discussions as a child that would probably never have been brought up, or at least for another 10 years.
This was also made into a movie called Night Crossing [0]. It's available for streaming from a few places [1].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Crossing
[1] http://www.canistream.it/search/movie/Night%20crossing
I remember watching this as a teenager. http://www.canistream.it/search/movie/53ae3fc8f5f807201c6b3d64/night-crossing shows rental available from amazon and others.
Disney actually made a movie out of this; they touch on it briefly at the end of the article. I watched it as a kid in once in school. It was called "Night Crossing" [0]. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's on any streaming service, but if you look around you might be able to find a DVD copy somewhere.
Also, as a side note, it's nice to see Damn Interesting on here. It's one of the better blogs out there even if they don't update as much as they used to. The article about the race to liquefy helium and chasing the lowest temperature ever was really, really good [1].
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] http://www.damninteresting.com/absolute-zero-is-0k/