realistfilm

Brest is not situated in Brittany. The terminus Brest is the frontier station between Belorussia and Poland. This place has seen many conquerors come and go. Therefore the terminus is a real and an anonymous space for telling about history and human fate. The manifold depicting of a suicide commited by a believing country defender stands besides the story of a young soldier, having lost his bearings, without his army and his relatives, it stands besides the tales of a man having survived the German and the Soviet concentration camps and stands besides the  all-beating humor of the singing taxi-driver. The most anxious question about the sense of all those sacrifices and privations -even about  those of the last two wars – was not pul neither from the medal-adorned Soviet war veterans at their feast day, nor from the Austrian battle-field veterans, lamenting about the “Bolshevik demagogic publications” against fascism. Archival material of the “Heroic Soviet Historiy” and war graves again and again make the film to a journey of the 20th Century.

»Grand Prix de Cinéma du réel«, für »VOKZAL-BAHNHOF BREST«
(17. International Film Festival »Cinema du reél«, Paris/ Frankreich 1995)

»Prix  Menção Honrosa«  für »VOKZAL-BAHNHOF BREST«
(VI. Encontros internacionais de Cinema, Lissabon/Portugal 1995)