The DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the only archive and research center outside of Germany devoted to a broad spectrum of filmmaking from and related to the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic - GDR). DEFA was the state owned film company of the GDR. The non-profit organization houses an extensive collection of 35mm and 16mm prints, dcps, DVDs, books, periodicals and articles. Students are involved in all aspects of the archive's research, outreach and teaching activities and also gain valuable non-academic experience in subtitling and library, conference and arts management. In order to fulfill its dual mission—to make DEFA films available and better known, and to broaden understanding of filmmaking in the GDR by interdisciplinary critical scholarship—the DEFA Film Library undertakes a range of scholarly and support activities. About the DEFA Film Library History The DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst was founded by Barton Byg, professor of film and German Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the late 1980s. The signing of an UMass memorandum on September 23, 1993 marks the DEFA Film Library's official founding. Byg's idea was to make films from the East German DEFA Studios more available and widely known in North America and to broaden popular and scholarly understanding of filmmaking in the GDR by critically exploring its aesthetic, political and ideological bases. DEFA stands for Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft. Founded a year after the end of World War II, it ultimately comprised a group of coordinated, state-run film studios, including, for example, the DEFA Feature and Documentary Film Studios, the Studio for Animation Films, etc. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and German Reunification the following year, it was not clear what would happen to the over 7,500 DEFA films that had been made between 1946 and 1992, as the film rights had belonged to the now-defunct former GDR. As the post-unification fate of East Germany's film heritage was being decided across the Atlantic, the DEFA Film Library's collection grew bit by bit. In 1997, an agreement with two German partners — Progress Film and the precursor to the DEFA Foundation — brought a collection of East German film journals and the largest collection of 16mm and 35mm prints of DEFA films outside of Germany to the UMass Amherst campus. Also housed in the DEFA Film Library archive are 16mm prints that were