Legendarily quiet with Volker Koepp: Somewhere in the Kaliningrad region (from »Elderblossom«)
Photo: RBB/Koepp/Vineta Film
Look instead of hitting things with the camera: Volker Koepp is the last great Defa documentary filmmaker who continued after 1989. “Through the quiet poetry of his calm imagery and the leisurely narrative rhythm, he makes the viewer rush through his life pause,” wrote Frank Schirrmeister in this newspaper. »When did you last take the time to take in the big, wide sky over the Baltic Sea when shopping, finding a parking space and having fun with children in a crowded holiday area require all your attention?
Koepp often filmed the landscapes of the Baltic Sea with his cameraman Thomas Plenert – who died in 2023 – and traveled to Sarmatia, East Prussia or Memelland – names for areas that no longer exist. Just like the LPG, the textile factory and the schnapps distillery in the Uckermark, the Prignitz or the Märkische Heide, whose workers Koepp accompanied as they lost their jobs.
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In 1999, in “Mr. Zwilling and Ms. Zuckermann,” he portrayed two Holocaust survivors in Chernivtsi in Bukovina, which the Germans and their Romanian allies had invaded in 1941 and killed almost all of the Jewish residents, half of the city’s population. In “Elderblossom” (photo) in 2007, he filmed children in the Kaliningrad region who are growing up practically without parents because they have to work abroad or drink themselves to death at home. The children seem very free.
Koepp rarely appears in his more than 60 films – and when he does, he mumbles something in the background. This is his cinematic-rhetorical midwifery technique, which creates large images from the small, characterized by a “desire for friendliness between people and the circumstances,” as Anke Westphal once wrote. He turns 80 this Saturday.
Highly recommended: five Koepp films in the MDR media library
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