Night Crossing

Night Crossing is a 1982 British-American thriller drama film starring John Hurt, Jane Alexander and Beau Bridges. The film is based on the true story of the Strelzyk and Wetzel families, who on September 16, 1979 attempted to escape from East Germany to West Germany in a homemade hot-air balloon during the Inner German border-era when immigration to West Germany was strictly prohibited by the East German government. It was the final theatrical film directed by Delbert Mann, and the last in which Kay Walsh appeared before retiring. Plot A brief summary of conditions in East Germany and the border zone shows stock footage such as Conrad Schumann's jump over barbed wire in Berlin as the Berlin Wall is constructed. In April 1978 in the small town of Pößneck, Thuringia, teenager Lukas Keller attempts to escape East Germany by riding a bulldozer through the Inner German border zone. However, he is shot by automatic machine guns and left for dead by the guards. His family is informed while on a picnic with their friends the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, and the entire Keller family are taken by the police. Aggravated with life under the GDR regime, Peter Strelzyk proposes a daring plan to his friend Günter Wetzel: they will build a balloon to carry themselves and their families (a total of eight people) over the border to West Germany. They purchase 1,255 square yards of taffeta, claiming that it is for a camping club, and Günter sews the fabric together with a sewing machine in his attic while Peter experiments for months with devising a burner for the hot-air balloon. They face setbacks such as fires while trying to inflate the balloon, a lack of power for the burner, extremely suspicious neighbors and doubts about the plan's feasibility by Günter's wife Petra.