Krieg und Frieden – Deutsch-sowjetische Skizzen

A documentary about the making of the final version of Metropolis by restoring all material from different sources.

The legendary cultural critic, author of books about M. Babanova, B. Brecht, A. Tarkovsky, Maya Turovskaya tells us a novel. Childhood, in people, my universities… She tells it like a writer. Only her novel is not written, but shot on camera and supplemented with photos and newsreel footage. In other words, it's a movie monologue about time. About a communal apartment in Maly Kozikhinsky Lane in Moscow. About my parents and my father's arrest. About kindergarten and school. About friends and girlfriends. About teachers. About the beginning of the war and the evacuation to Sverdlovsk. About her husband, critic Boris Medvedev, who met the war on the border, and ended it in Stalingrad. About parallel studies at Moscow State University and at GITIS. About the fight against rootless cosmopolitans.

"Puss Riot and other sins" - The Putin system is taking on more and more features of the Soviet system. The big fear and paranoia returns.

"Tracing Battleship Potemkin" goes on to detail the extensive number of shots long lost from constant authorized and unauthorized re-cuts in the last 80 years, and how many of those shots have been returned. Indeed, the film is all the more powerful and lyrical with a number of key scenes (especially the famed "Odessa steps" sequence) filled out and shaded with emotional nuance.

After a ten year long stay in West Germany, Max returns to the Soviet Union to visit his deadly ill father in Leningrad. There he finds a friend in a man who calls himself Igor and he begins a love-affair with the deafmute Lena. Around Max' relationship to his father, Igor and Lena, losely held episodes give a many fasetted portrait of Leningrad and its inhabitants. In the eyes of the returning Max, the city is at once well-known and foreign. Lyrically saturated images and sophisticated editing contributes to making the film an expressive description of a changing city.