Petra Epperlein’s quest to find out if her father was an informant in the Stasi, East Germany’s answer to the Thought Police is simple but powerful. Though we’ve seen the story told before in a fictionalized (and apparently, according to Karl Marx City, exaggerated) in the wonderful film The Lives of Others, this film takes one woman’s search for answers in the labyrinthine Stasi archives and makes it very personal. Epperlein is portrayed in third person in voice over and first person on screen with her fuzzy boom microphone and earphones which make her as much of an object to be studied as what she herself is studying, but the affectation actually amplifies and imitates the Stasi methodologies. Cameras, still photographers, even your best friends and neighbors: you could not trust anyone in the post war GDR. Its applicability to today hardly a thought bubble away.