Donnersmarck told Alan Riding of the New York Times, "I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening in to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him. I sat down and in a couple of hours had written the treatment."

That scene appears in The Lives of Others, and is limned with extraordinary stillness and compressed emotion by Ulrich Mühe, an actor heretofore unknown outside Germany who gives a performance so perfect in this, and every other moment in the film, that it's almost beyond words.

"People don't change," the minister of culture says to Dreyman at the beginning of the movie. The dramatic challenge Donnersmarck set for himself was to offer a portrait of the ways people do change even when they don't wish to change--even when it is literally life-threatening to change.

But even though The Lives of Others is set primarily in 1984, it's not 1984. This is not a morality play about East Germany, or a fictional catalogue of the horrors of life under communism. It's a character study in the guise of a stunning suspense thriller. When the rigorously correct Stasi man Wiesler begins to go off the reservation, it's impossible to determine his motivation and therefore impossible to know what he's going to do next, or why. As the playwright Dreyman begins to take creative and political risks for the first time in his life, his fate is entirely in Wiesler's hands--and like the culture minister who started the investigation, Wiesler is besotted by the playwright's beautiful and talented girlfriend.

Donnersmarck's work is so fresh and so original in part because he is working with a great, rich, infinitely absorbing subject--a subject other filmmakers across the world continue to avoid like the plague. This is strange. Life under communism would seem to be among the least controversial topics one could imagine. After all, who outside of Vladimir Putin's inner circle actually longs for a restoration of the Soviet Empire? But you can count on two hands and a foot the number of major motion pictures made since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that have attempted any kind of reckoning of the human cost of communism in the 20th century.

Among the cultural cognoscenti across the world, there seems to be a hunger to let this subject simply slide down the rabbit hole. Donnersmarck found it difficult to secure financing for The Lives of Others, which cost a negligible $2 million to make. And the organizers of the Berlin Film Festival refused to accept it as an official entry in 2006--a decision that, in sheer aesthetic terms, has to be reckoned among the most perverse I've ever heard about. Once released, it made a sensation in Germany and is among the most successful films ever released there. That's not surprising. There are few German films since the fall of the Weimar Republic that come anywhere near The Lives of Others.