This review looks back at Solo Sunny, Konrad Wolf's 1980 East German drama about a would-be pop singer trying to break free from a drab touring gang show and pursue a solo career. Wolf, a state-sanctioned GDR film-maker whose brother Markus was a senior Stasi official, captures the melancholy of thwarted ambition within the constraints of communist East Germany, in a film the reviewer likens to a rueful B-side to Cabaret.

The film follows Ingrid "Sunny" Sommer (Renate Krößner), a former factory worker touring clubs and community centres with a naff band called the Tornadoes, alongside a sub-jazz-funk sound, an acrobat act and an unpleasant MC. A brief romance with stand-in saxophonist Ralph (Alexander Lang) spurs her to try for solo stardom, escaping the shabby band and its unwanted attentions, while the film subtly evokes the tension between collectivist GDR ideals and the pull of western-style glamour amid the grey tenements and Trabants of Prenzlauer Berg.