A documentary by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. In English and German with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Using grim spy photography left over from the Communist era, Karl Marx City establishes a starkly beautiful black-and-white aesthetic to narrow history down to a single family’s struggle.

Petra Epperlein grew up in the former GDR and managed to get out in its waning days, eventually marrying American filmmaker Michael Tucker. Epperlein’s father, a big shot in Eastern Bloc industrial circles but never a party member, stayed behind in relatively comfortable circumstances. But he killed himself in 1999 after sending a cryptic letter to his daughter. She decided to use her filmmaking skills to find out why.

With headphones over her short white hair, austere black attire, and sound equipment in hand, Epperlein makes a sometimes self-conscious tour guide. But discomfort is her starting point for this inquest, which finds her gently prodding her still-startled mother and more sanguine twin brothers for answers that barely slip out. Turns out that after the wall came down, their dad received anonymous letters accusing him of collaboration with the Stasi—the dreaded state-security apparatus that, at its height, employed almost 100,000 full-time agents and twice as many paid (or coerced) snitches out of only 16 million citizens.

This terror apparatus resulted in a poisoned cornucopia of surveillance footage, which the filmmakers weave around their own material, effectively making everyone and everything look suspicious (especially in the eyes of the gargantuan bust of Marx that still looks over the city of the title, now called Chemnitz). Some of the most interesting stuff, though, is found in straightforward interviews with curators and archivists who are preserving this record of mostly banal state brutality. Their files also hold a number of possible clues for Epperlein. In the end, the explanations she receives are both more mundane and more disturbing than expected. And not as black-and-white as you might think.