Get your passport stamped at the DEFA Film Library and meet our staff. While visiting our offices, enjoy seeing an exhibit of film posters of several banned DEFA films shown at the Museum of Modern Arts in NYC for the 2005 film retrospective, Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany. Visitors will also Get your passport stamped at the DEFA Film Library and meet our staff. While visiting our offices, enjoy seeing an exhibit of film posters of several banned DEFA films shown at the Museum of Modern Arts in NYC for the 2005 film retrospective, Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany. Visitors will also be able to: watch short DEFA animations and film trailers; explore our video-on-demand collection available for free through Kanopy Streaming (Du Bois Library for campus members and public libraries for the public); take a picture in front of the poster for the first post-WWII German film, The Murderers Are among Us; and take home some swag.

The DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, founded in 1993 by German Studies Prof. Emeritus Barton Byg in collaboration with UMass Amherst and German governmental partners, is the only archive and research center outside of Germany with access to over 6,000 films (produced from 1946 to 1990), and devoted to a broad spectrum of filmmaking from and related to East Germany. It houses an extensive collection of 35- and 16mm prints, DVDs, Blu-rays, DCPs, digital film files, books, periodicals, articles and related production materials. As an archival, educational and cultural institution, the DEFA Film Library performs its responsibility of stewardship through a number of initiatives: advancing research; the development of teaching materials, texts, and English-language supplemental materials; release of newly subtitled films; strategic collaborations and partnerships with an international and interdisciplinary network; and academic and public-facing community engagement.