Meetings with readers, acquaintances and contemporaries of writer Uwe Johnson at the places where he lived. Volker Koepp, who is also from Pomerania, looks for Johnson’s sophisticated literary voice in the landscapes of the region they both stem from.
Following Landstück (2016), Volker Koepp's documentary Seestück is about the magical, natural setting of the Baltic Sea, its coasts and its people – including fishermen, seamen, scientists and young people on both the Baltic and Scandinavian shores. Conversations meander from Caspar David Friedrich to Copernicus, Rousseau and Kant, or simply life itself. Present concerns address the sea's threatened ecosystem and political frictions among the neighbouring countries. One universal truth applies for the small Baltic Sea too: The landscape is a window to the world.
The film tells the story of the East Prussian landscape and its inhabitants. At one time Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Jews lived here alongside and with one another. After World War II and the expulsion of Germans by Stalin, the Prussian province turned into a Russian enclave. Volker Koepp’s fourth film about the Kaliningrad region is dedicated to the generation, born in the '90s, and familiar with the Soviet Union and East Prussia only from school books. Parents and grandparents who were forcefully resettled to where they are now have never really felt at home. In the meantime they have hopelessly succumbed to unemployment and alcohol. Their children can only rely on themselves. Older siblings look after the younger ones, they play with what lies around, and the girl Ljuda can’t wait to finally turn eighteen, to be able to take her brothers home from the orphanage. The film has much confidence in the children. But what will become of them?
Shortly behind the once East Prussian, now Russian town of Tilsit, the Memel splits into a delta. The widest arms of this delta, the Ruß and Gilge, finally flow into the Curonian Lagoon. The river landscape is characterized by high soil moisture. Cultivation was only possible thanks to a complicated drainage system. The Gilge was also an important waterway. Today, this drainage system is decaying, the Gilge is silting up and the landscape is being renaturalized. The old villages are falling into disrepair due to a lack of money and life is characterized by increasing poverty. We meet the inhabitants, such as the farmer Anatoli, who came here from Siberia and built a new house on the foundations of a German house, or old Anastasia, who can still remember living with the Germans until they were expelled.
A group of men shoot their mouths off in a pub. Their animated talk is all action-packed yarns and, of course, about women.
Interview with Volker Koepp about his filmmaking practice conducted and directed by Christoph Hübner
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