Slatan Dudow

Dudow's first feature, Kuhle Wampe (To Whom Does the World Belong?, 1932) was a collaboration with Brecht[2] (who provided the script and helped finance the project), Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Ottwalt.

He was soon expelled from Germany as a Bulgarian citizen, but was unable to return to Bulgaria for reasons unknown (and to which Brecht alludes in a July 1933 letter to the Russian playwright Sergei Tretyakov).

In Paris, Dudow completed the film Seifenblasen, which he had begun working on in Berlin, and also staged Brecht's Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs.

Despite the symbolic capital Dudow brought to DEFA as a renowned Weimar-era left-wing filmmaker, this first project was shelved by the authorities apparently because the film was deemed formalist.

It features a cast of important actresses of various generations (including Lotte Loebinger, Maly Delschaft, and Sonja Sutter) and shows the circumstances of a divided Berlin, still in the early postwar period.

The Captain from Cologne (1956), a rather bleak satire featuring Rolf Ludwig, Christel Bodenstein, and Erwin Geschonneck, was adapted by Dudow, along with Henryk Keisch and Michael Tschesno-Hell, from Carl Zuckmayer's play Der Hauptmann von Köpenick.