Night Crossing is a 1982 thriller drama film starring John Hurt, Jane Alexander and Beau Bridges.
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, but is shot by automatic machine guns and left for dead by the guards.
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 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.
Petra agrees to the plan, especially because her mother in West Berlin is very sick and the East German government has repeatedly denied her request to visit her.
Peter tries to buy taffeta, claiming it is for his group of Young Pioneers, but the store manager secretly notifies the Stasi.
On 15 September 1979, the families prepare to act on the plan while the Stasi finds blood-pressure medicine belonging to Peter's wife Doris where the first balloon had landed.
Opinions such as: 'The movie was exciting and I really had to cheer for this escape to succeed'; 'These people and their courage were to be admired'; 'There are even more possibilities and methods to leave the GDR illegally' were not uncommon in the discussion.
"[4] Maslin stated that the film, "directed with a reassuring corniness by Delbert Mann", featured performers who "tend toward white-knuckled overstatement", with all four of the adults "terrifically tearful during the portion of the movie that details their painful decision to float across the Iron Curtain", and that despite this, "when they finally take off, the story does, too".
The real star of the film according to Maslin was the balloon, of which the version produced specifically by Disney "performed splendidly, even if it didn't look the least bit homemade.