Borderland

Few filmmakers could make a film about the internal borders of Europe with the authority of Andreas Voigt, one of the pivotal DEFA documentarians working at the time of the collapse of the socialist project in Eastern Germany. Three decades after making his first film about the region, Voigt returns to the borderlands where the outer limits of Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic intersect. He encounters a people with a porous cultural identity, where family histories are intertwined with an array of dialects and legacies. The key is the word borderland over border: this is a space of invisible cultural osmosis, the exact start and end point of which can not be easily located. As in Voigt’s earlier work, the stories that these regular people recount – covering their aspirations, work, the divergences of their family members – give way to a far more idiosyncratic portrait of a place, and an era.