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 I am not much of a movie-goer. But whenever I see a truly good movie, I feel life would be incomplete without watching all the good movies produced around the world — it’s the same silly wish about reading all the good books in the world after one has read a real gem of a book.

Sadly, India, despite being the largest film-producing country in the world, does not make many realistic movies that portray sensitive socio-political themes with the force of authenticity and creativity. It’s not often that Indian cinema holds a mirror to the tumultuous periods in our national history, enabling the old to relive a cathartic experience and the young to debate the rights and wrongs of that period. Has there, for example, been a single memorable movie about the Emergency, in the 1970s, even though India then came nearest to becoming a police state?

My source of good movies from around the globe is my friend Bharatbala of Vande Mataram fame, a filmmaker who is currently working on several creative projects. “I am sending you,” he said recently, “the DVD of a German movie called The Lives of Others, which won the Oscar last year for the best foreign language film. We are releasing it soon in theatres across India. It’s a must-see.”

It indeed is, for it shows how menacing a police state can be. But it is worth watching for another, more important, reason. For it also shows, in the tradition of all good art, how ordinary human beings can rise to great heights of heroism by listening to the voice of their conscience and making moral choices between right and wrong in the face of grave personal risks.

The Lives of Others is set in communist-ruled East Germany a few years before it disappeared from the map of the world in 1990. The government employed hundreds of thousands of spies and civilian informers to work for Stasi, a KGB-like secret police agency.

It snooped on the lives of all those citizens, especially writers and artists, who were suspected for their lack of faith in ‘socialism’ and were therefore treated as ‘enemies of the state’, with varying degrees of punishment. Of course, since the system was steeped in corruption, even loyal citizens were often spied upon and terrorised for the selfish interests of party bosses.

The film’s protagonist is a low-level Stasi official, a tough and incorruptible interrogator who genuinely believes in socialism and thinks it to be his duty to keep an eye on suspects in the literary and artistic community. He is assigned, under instructions from a powerful minister in the government, to spy on a famous playwright and his actress girlfriend. He wires up the playwright’s apartment and begins listening to their conversation from an attic in the building. To his surprise, he finds nothing damning about the playwright, who, on the contrary, comes across as an honest citizen and devoted believer in socialism. In the course of his spying, he also discovers that the real reason behind the assignment is that the minister, who has blackmailed the actress for sexual gratification, wants the playwright out of the way so he can have the actress for himself.

Having hit the moral crossroads, he resolves, at great risk to himself, to save the playwright and keep the lovers together. Tragically, the actress dies out of guilt. The film reaches its end — which is at once heartbreaking and redeeming — with the playwright discovering that he had been saved by the Stasi agent and the ex-spy (for by now the communist regime is gone and the two Germanys are reunited) discovering that the latest book by the person whom he spied on has been dedicated to him.

At one level, the film is about the most momentous events in the latter half of the last century — the rise and fall of Berlin Wall, the birth and death of communist states that propounded a noble ideal but self-destructed by turning into police states, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s humane revolution through glasnost and perestroika, leading to the end of the Cold War. At another, deeper level, it is about the eternal drama of human life, when men and women confront the call of their conscience in myriad situations.

The greatness of young German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (he is only 35), is that he has employed the power of subtlety and insight to create a movie that runs like a spell-binding novel on the screen. Even if you have appreciated it only in its English subtitles, at the end of watching it you wonder: “Can cinema be so good?”

One reason why I am so stirred and shaken by the film is that, all through the 1970s and the 1980s, I was myself a devoted communist and believed in all the propaganda emanating from the Soviet Union, East Germany and other parts of the ‘socialist heaven’. It would be interesting to see how Comrades Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury, whose party (of which I was once an activist) never used to utter a word those days about the dehumanising conduct of the police states in Moscow and Berlin, would react to The Lives of Others when it is screened in Indian cities.