While the quality of the film is uneven, the overall experiment makes the film worth watching. Director Andreas Dresen (trained in the former East Germany), who often works with these actors, decided to make a film without a script (needless to say, he had some difficulty gaining funding!) A dramaturg worked to ensure narrative consistency, and the small film team met to plan the scenes for the next day. The focus becomes a focus on the characters and their experience of a place we hear little about - the town of Frankfurt on the Oder, which is located deep in the former East Germany on the Polish border. By the way - the film often is compared to Dogme95, with good reason. However, Dresen, in interviews, rejects the restrictive nature of the Dogme95 guidelines.

I'm very fond of this movie. The authenticity of the actors, the very light and playful use of humor an subtle gags and the fact, that although they were doing it on a very low budget, you're not going to be sick by the way they handle the camera makes this so absolutely enjoyable. its setting in frankfurt/oder is also something very different even though films on the soil of the ex-gdr are on the increase. i haven't seen such a film since 'Männer' which is a few decades ago.this movie tells a common story like no other. watch it in german.

Halbe Treppe is a good film, but is even more interesting when you realize a key point about it's production. The first is that most of the dialogue and plot is improvised. There was a lot of unused, and presumably unusable, footage.It's also a crazy film, in the way that life is often crazy.I first saw this film in Berlin, without subtitles and found the accents a little thick, but it's also a great film for students of German who want some practice understanding real, colloquial speech.

The story of the film is uncomplicated, but very realistic. This is also helped a lot by the actors who improvised the whole dialogues (which gives them the nice charme of the "Didi & Stulle" comics, including the dialect). In the beginning this is very funny, but you stop laughing when you notice that what you are watching is like real life.