Froide Patrie

"It’s a story about a country on the edge of Europe, bordered by the Baltic Sea and lashed by the north winds. Once a powerful state of northern Germany in the 16th Century, dispossessed of half its territory during the Napoleonic Wars, it regained its power in the 19th Century under William I.
But at the end of the war in 1945 the territory was divided into West Prussia - a province of former Prussia and handed over to Poland - and East Prussia which was split between the USSR and Poland. The latter’s capital, Königsberg, became Kaliningrad.
Volker Koepp’s remarkable undertaking has been both to reveal unique portraits of different people and to present a rough illustration of the collective psychology of a composite population. The people up there come from different cultures, language backgrounds and experiences. Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, but also Kazakhs and Armenians, they are the witnesses, objects and victims of territorial and political bartering which has resulted in forced migrations and painful uprootings.
Such as the German woman evacuated in 1944 from her native Prussia by the Russians, who returns to the homeland of her memories to show the film-maker her childhood home. One is struck by the serenity of this woman who harbours no thoughts of violence, resentfulness or agression. Just like a number of other people that Volker Koepp met, she betrays an undercurrent of lucid disillusionment and a sort of disenchanted wisdom which has been built-up over forced journeys and the imposed contact with alien cultures.
But it takes the tenacity and the psychological subtlety of a filmmaker who has been well-versed in the wide variey of film-making processes to manage to depict the portraits of the characters in this story, connected to so many true and symbolic tales of the daily violence dealt out in the name of state machinations. The faces and the voices of the old and young alike constitute the landscape of memory and ambition and never seem alien since Volker Koepp takes time, brilliantly, to meet them. As echoes of these presences, the recurrent images of the sea, storks darting across the sky, the wind and rain that lash the countryside, winter and summer, lend a paradoxically epic dimension to a story that has become bogged-down and forgotten, whose walls and roofs bear the scars of the wounds of time past and endlessly rebegun." (Jean Perret - in catalogue Visions du Réel, 2008)