I also surprised this couple in the public garden near my home. Looking at people through a viewfinder, as I have already said when discussing the photographer's POV in the Shadow Catchers' series, may be chronicle, reportage, art, and also a sort of voyeristic interest in other people's lives. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) is a 2006 German drama film, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The film involves the monitoring of the cultural scene of East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police.The film succeeded in Germany despite a widespread contemporary reluctance in the country, particularly in its films, to confront the totalitarian excesses of the East German state. Time magazine's Richard Corliss named the film the second best of the Top 10 Movies of 2007. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film his highest rating of four stars. Anna Funder, the author of a book about the Stasi (Stasiland), wrote in a review of the movie for The Guardian that it was not possible for a Stasi operative to have hidden much information from superiors because Stasi employees themselves were watched and operated in teams, seldom if ever working alone. She noted that in his Director's statement, Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote, 'More than anything else, The Lives of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path.' Funder replied: 'This is an uplifting thought. But what is more likely to save us from going down the wrong path again is recognizing how human beings can be trained and forced into faceless systems of oppression, in which conscience is extinguished.' Nevertheless, Funder said, the movie is a 'superb film' despite not being true to reality. I liked this film very much, even if its mood was the opposite of another great German film, the cheerful Goodbye, Lenin. Here the mood is keyed on the grey, melancholic voyeurism of this petty bureaucrat, who preys on the lives of the others, who are a group of liberal-minded intellectuals, but drinking from their intellectual blood in the end makes him to whish freedom too, and he helps them anonymously. Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts are free) is a famous, ancient German song. And elites defending their power, be they at the head of a state, an empire, or a simple community, hate them and try their best to get rid of those who think them. Thanks for your kind comments.