Since then, Kleinert has risen quickly on the festival circuit as a director with something provocative to say about life in eastern Germany. His Verlorene Landschaft (Lost Landscape, 1993), in which a West German politician returns to an abandoned East German border-village after the supposed death of his parents and makes some unexpected discoveries about his own past, plays as a surreal psychodrama in a bleak industrial setting. His next two films - Neben Der Zeit (Outside Time, 1996) and Im Namen Der Unschuld (In The Name Of Innocence, 1998) - continued his investigations into the breakdown of relations in a decaying social structure.

In all Kleinert's films, his powerful metaphorical statements are put across by solid ensemble casts and solid professional credits. In Wege In Die Nacht, shot again in black-and-white (the speciality of ace cameraman Jürgen Jürges), Hilmar Thate plays an ex-communist factory manager who has lost his bearings in post-unification Germany. The 55-year-old Walter, an idealist and formerly a man of position and power, can barely stomach being unemployed, living off his waitress wife's earnings. Spurred on by an undying belief in a better world, he recruits a pair of simple-minded youngsters (Henriette Heinze and Dirk Borchardt) to ride Berlin's underground and city trains - his "paths in the night" - and sends them on a vigilante mission to do good and fight evil. But as aficionados of Kleinert's early work may guess, there are unexpected complications.
Ron Holloway