Eastern Trails: The Western at DEFA – Masters of Cinema Series

A close relation to the Spaghetti Western, Indianerfilme (later called “Red Westerns” due to their politics) were some of the most popular genre movies produced by East Germany’s state-operated film studio, DEFA. Focusing on the struggles of indigenous tribes against European settlers, they disrupted the frontier myths central to the American Western and made a bonafide superstar of Gojko Miti?, whose appearances in a long line of action-packed Westerns for DEFA made him one of the most famous faces in Europe. Miti? stars in all four of the films presented here: Chingachgook the Great Serpent, Fatal Error, Apaches and Blood Brothers.
Based on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, Chingachgook the Great Serpent sees the eponymous Mohican set out to rescue his kidnapped bride-to-be (Andrea Drahota) with the help of a hunter known as Deerslayer (Rolf Rmer). In Fatal Error, Native Americans living at the foot of the Rocky Mountains come to re