HOLUNDERBLÜTE

A film recounting the history of a landscape, that of East Prussia, and of its inhabitants. An area rich in history, it was once home to co-existing communities of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. After World War II and Stalin’s deportation of the Germans, the Prussian province became a Russian exclave of strategic rather than economic significance, an absurd residue of political power games. The fourth film by Volker Koepp about the area known as the Kaliningrad Oblast deals with the generation born in the 1990s, youngsters to whom the Soviet Union and East Prussia are names in school textbooks. They live in a different reality, with parents and grandparents who were forcibly resettled in the area and never put down roots. They have meanwhile resigned themselves to being unemployed, and take solace in alcohol. Left to themselves, the older children take care of the younger ones, play with whatever they find lying about. Liuda, for instance, can’t wait to come of age, because then her brother will arrive to take her out of the children’s home.

The fascination the area holds for Koepp is also due to the poems of Johannes Bobrowski. One poem celebrates the elderberry trees whose delicate blossoms are characteristic of the landscape. They are held in veneration as the patrons of houses and children. Most of the historical architecture is ruined beyond repair; nature has began to reclaim its territory, wilderness is encroaching. The film places a lot of faith in the children. But what will become of them?

(Catalogue Leipzig, 2007)