Balloon

Not every true story merits two full-scale movie productions, but the 1979 escape retold in the new film Balloon is the rare exception. As the title suggests, it’s about two East German families who attempted to flee to West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon. Their saga was previously made into a Disney adventure film titled Night Crossing (1982), but the real-life subjects, the Strelzyk and Wetzel families, never really liked that Americanized telling. So they were happy to cooperate with this new German-language production — even if the director, Michael “Bully” Herbig, was a standup comedian who had never helmed such a demanding drama.

Herbig does a phenomenal job. Even knowing how this is all going to end, Balloon is intensely suspenseful, beginning with a first, failed escape attempt and ending with a nail-biting second try as the Stasi (secret police) close in. Some touches strike a melodramatic note, but much of the nicely detailed subplot about the Stasi investigation is based on once-secret files not available to the Disney team.

The German cast is uniformly excellent, entirely believable in part because American viewers are unlikely to have seen any of the actors before. Some German critics dismissed Balloon because it glosses over the problems of the country’s 1990 reunification, but such concerns seem misplaced in a movie that’s intended as an inspirational thriller. It’s just an amazing, true tale, well told, consistently entertaining and evidently adhering largely to the facts, right down to the exact look of the balloon itself — which was reconstructed at full scale. Call Balloon “escapism” in the best sense.

Now available to rent via grailmoviehouse.com