I am imprisoned. I am in here for three years. I am having to endure and more two years and three months. I don’t know if I can endure. I don’t speak. This is a curse and there is no reply to make back to a curse.

There are a variety of reasons why I think it is important to subscribe to Overland. There is the sheer necessity of having a literary journal that isn’t suspicious or afraid of politics, that understands that we writers and we readers are as equally engaged in expressions of the imagination as we are in questions of ethical and social justice.

Artists are neither a ‘proletariat’ nor a ‘vanguard’, and they do not make successful ‘revolutionaries’. If they have been, it has only been for a moment before the firing squad or the gulag or the concentration camp has seen to their ignoble demise. Some of the more fortunate are taken up as a permanent class of bohemian émigrés by whatever cities happen to be the cultural centres of their moment.

It begins with a young man, terrified, panicked, being brought in for interrogation by a Stasi officer, Gerd Weisler (an excellent performance by Ulrich Mühe). You can almost smell the stink of the young man's sweat, of his fear; you can sense that he is going to piss himself. Cutting away from the interrogation itself, we are in a drab classroom where young students, training to be the future grey faceless men and women of the Stasi.

It has always struck me as odd that in a country that places great store in the overseas (read Hollywood) success of ‘our actors' - as in ‘our' Nic, ‘our' Naomi, ‘our' Russ, ‘our' Cate - film reviewing culture has not developed a stronger analysis of performance as one of the elements of cinema.