Farewell, Beautiful Forest… or How a Film Was Censored

Farewell, Beautiful Forest… or How a Film Was Censored - When the forest was dying, silence became the state’s law

In the Ore Mountains, an ecological disaster unfolded during the 1980s as entire forests withered and died. Foresters and residents struggled to save their landscape, but in East Germany, the subject itself was taboo.

The state refused to acknowledge the crisis, turning silence into policy. Proposed in 1983, the project was delayed for years until the filmmaker was granted permission in 1987. In 1988, the crew documented the forest dieback in the Czech-German border region of Most and Teplice. Yet despite eight separate edits, the film was consistently censored, and the project was banned.

It was only after the seismic political changes of 1989–1990 that the original version could be reconstructed, this time incorporating the story of its censorship into the film itself. The result is a powerful testament not only to environmental destruction but also to the silencing of truth under authoritarian rule.