The Sixties may have been even more exaggerated in the hothouse atmosphere of the East German musical HOT SUMMER than they ever were in Beach Blanket Bingo. In HOT SUMMER, the East Germany"s "Grease", two groups of high school students--eleven girls and ten boys--meet on their way to a vacation on the Baltic Sea they face off like a rugby team, and with one extra girl there"s bound to be trouble. The inevitable love story soon brews between the impetuous Kai (Frank Schöbel) and the precocious Brit (Chris Doerk), who are soon professing their love to each other... and starting trouble for everyone else in the group. The popularity of Schöbel and Doerk, an East German pop duet, helped HOT SUMMER skyrocket to be one of the top films of 1968 and placed the film"s music on all the hit radio play lists. Beginning with its release, this German camp classic provided sheer entertainment value to teens in a culture that was undergoing deep political changes. In 1968 audiences rushed to movie theatres to watch this teenage-romp over and over again. Back then the film carried a unique promise of freedom and happiness in the socialist system. When the film was shot, none of the filmmakers could foresee the dreadful disaster which would occur in the Prague Spring of August 1968. In this respect HOT SUMMER, by mere chance, offered the perfect escape from the images of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia and an escape from the realization, that with this, the last chance for a liberal and democratic socialism had died.