Ulrich Mühe, who plays the Stasi officer at the center of this story, accused his own wife of informing on him to the secret police during their marriage. He died sixteen months after the film's release.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006) is set in East Berlin in 1984. Gerd Wiesler, played by Mühe, is assigned to spy on celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman, played by Sebastian Koch, and his partner, actress Christa-Maria Sieland, played by Martina Gedeck. The surveillance is ordered not for state security but because a Party minister wants Dreyman out of the way and Sieland for himself.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote and directed the film, his first feature, shooting on locations in Berlin that still carried the texture of the divided city. Wiesler listens from an attic through headphones, logging every conversation and intimacy, and as he does, the life he overhears begins to mean more to him than the orders he was given.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.