If you’re a fan of the handful-of-scrappy-rebels against The Empire brand of story, and you’ve sworn off Star Wars forever after Jar Jar, I can recommend a documentary called “The Tunnel” that’s starting to do the rounds on cable teevee.
It’s about a crew of students who decide to build a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to help people in East Berlin to escape. It’s a documentary, too, not a docudrama. And it has some fantastic footage.
At one point, the tunnel builders, strapped for cash and encountering flooding problems, finds an American NBC film crew creating a set for a fictional story about a group tunneling under the wall. In exchange for a much-needed financial shot-in-the-arm, the real-life tunnelers gave NBC access to the tunnel to film its construction and the eventual escapes. This footage puts you there, in the tunnel, with the students and their shovels and their jerry-rigged ventilation, lighting, and drainage gear.
