WOHINUNDZURÜCK (Russia, 2007)

Who was Leo Dunz? That question was forced on Florian Schwarz when he found an old photograph of his grandfather up in the attic. Dunz served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, and until 1947 was held prisoner in the Siberian city of Asbest, a past of which he never spoke. Sixty-five years later Schwarz – armed with a camera rather than a rifle – travelled through Russia in an attempt to reconstruct this blank page in the family history. The resulting visual document was more than a journey back through time in family and world history. It became a journey through contemporary Russia, a road movie about a monotonous and unvarying décor, where silence and time are one’s foremost fellow travellers.