Hinter dem Schneesturm

GUEST OF THE PERSPECTIVE 2016
WINNER OF THE 2015 FIRST STEPS AWARD (DOCUMENTARY)
“Earth is a memory” is a line from this film. The earth absorbs the dead and their memories along with them, and digging for these memories can change the perspective on a life. In 1943 the director Levin Peter’s grandfather was stationed in Ukraine as a soldier of the occupying army. Now he lives, as old as the hills and with very little contact to the outside world, as though on a lost island, in a small room in an old people’s home. One day Levin Peter found a photo album in his grandfather’s cupboard. Page after page, it led him deeper into the war and into Ukraine. The final photos showed enigmatic and abstract silhouettes of people on the snow-drifted steppes near the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. They became in a way the inspiration for this film which connects long discussions between grandfather and grandson with the spectres from that time and links all of this with the young filmmaker’s modern-day impressions of Ukraine. A friction-filled attempt at coming to an agreement about the shadows we call memory.