From NetFlix:

Set in 1980s East Berlin, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s debut feature (which earned an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) provides an exquisitely nuanced portrait of life under the watchful eye of the state police as a high-profile couple is bugged. When a successful playwright and his actress companion become subjects of the Stasi’s secret surveillance program, their friends, family and even those doing the watching find their lives changed too.

For me this compelling film (recommended in “1001 Films To See Before You Die”) was a “feel good” because it has the most memorable and wonderful ending. In between there is a lot of sadness. Also the film is somewhat illustrative of the phrase “the banality of evil”. Not that those times were easy: the Stasi blackmailed ordinary people into spying on their neighbors.

The banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. This concept has it critics. See The Banality Of Evil