The spectre of George Orwell looms large over Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s impressive debut The Lives of Others, a trenchant and powerful look at the fascist regime and oppressive life in East Germany circa 1984. It mines a similar paranoia-drenched, privacy-invading territory as The Conversation, but where Coppola’s film finished with a gloomy outlook for the future, von Donnersmarck offers hope and redemption. The winner of the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar, the film functions both as an absorbing character-based espionage thriller and a shrewd, occasionally amusing corrective to the overt ostalgie (nostalgia for the German Democratic Republic) of the likes of Goodbye Lenin!. Performances are stellar and finely nuanced, in particular Ulrich Mühe, whose Wiesler provides the story’s most engaging character arc, transforming from stern, humorless drone to a recognisable human being struggling to fill the void of his life with the richness of his subjects’ companionship and devotion to their craft.