‘The Wall’ revisits the Cold War’s starkest symbol

“In the end, it wasn’t politicians who brought down the wall,’’ Morton notes. “It was ordinary Germans, who risked their lives to stand against a repressive regime and make a revolution without a shot being fired.’’

It’s an engrossing story, and “The Wall’’ tells it well. Arlington-based filmmaker Eric Stange — who went to high school in Boston, graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and attended graduate school at Boston University — lays out the circumstances that led to the construction of the wall in 1961 with a clarity that could make “The Wall’’ a useful classroom tool.

Stange does a skillful job interweaving archival footage and present-day interviews in ways that illuminate the human cost — separated families, stunted lives — of that concrete-and-barbed-wire abomination. We hear of an 18-year-old who bled to death (one of many who died in desperate attempts to escape) after being shot by a border guard while trying to cross the wall from East Berlin to West Berlin. One German man describes how he dug a tunnel under the wall to bring his wife and two young sons to freedom, only to end up in a shootout with a young East German border guard.

“The Wall’’ shows how East German reformers began to capitalize on two developments in the 1980s: the ascension to Soviet leadership of the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev, and the decision by East German authorities to offer protected status for prayer meetings in churches, in the smug assumption that it would show the irrelevance of organized religion. The opposite happened, as the churches quickly became gathering spots for environmentalists, feminists, peace activists, and others determined to bring about social change. Protest rallies soon followed, control began to slip from the East German government’s hands, and the stage was set for the events of November 1989.