Director’s Statement

We live in dangerous times now. Dangerous and exciting times. Like it or not, the Cold War is back, only this time, we’ve added the technological terror of mass surveillance.

It almost makes you wish for the simpler, good old days of the first Cold War. Remember that? Carter and Brezhnev, Honecker and Schmidt. Wired telephones, typewriters, tiny spy cameras with film you had to develop in a dark room first?

I miss those spy films, where people had to rely on their own intelligence, their ability to blend in and their own ability to suppress their humanity, in order to complete their mission.

I wanted to explore the axis of sex, love and duty, like the film Three Days of the Condor. But I was always more interested in the women than the men. I wanted to see the film through the eyes of Faye Dunaway rather than Robert Redford.

As dear Sophie Zimmermann says in my film,

“Women trust too quickly, that’s why they are never the spies.”

So this tale of a quiet, lonely West German secretary who falls in love with a double-crossing Stasi spy, is my attempt at giving space to Sophie’s story.

Love,
Marcus Lim