Shooting on digital video, Volker Koepp ventures into the 'Schattenland' (shadowland) of Masuria, a lake land region in the north-east of Poland, bordering on the Kaliningrad Oblast, and part of East Prussia until 1945. There he encounters a variety of people: poor Ukrainian farmers who settled after the Second World War, estranged from Poland but with no obvious links to Ukraine; fishermen scraping a living, chipping through ice to seek their meagre catch; a young architect from Warsaw and his Lithuanian partner in their holiday home, attracted by the scenery; a retired German newscaster, reminiscing about the post-war flight of the German population.
In the best documentary style, these interviews are unobtrusive, focused entirely on the speakers, in their homes or in the fields, and interspersed with footage of the land - water, trees, clouds, snow, light. It is long enough to leave room for contemplation, overspilling the standard one-hour slot given to made-for-TV docs (in Britain at least: perhaps German TV is better).
Unfortunately, although the interviews (mostly in Polish and Russian/Ukrainian) were subtitled in English, there were passages of German historical narration (read out by Koepp?) earlier in the film which were not subtitled. I do not speak German, but I could gather from the reference to dates (I can stretch to 'Jahrhundert') that he was talking about the Prussian legacy of Masuria and its ruins. Since this film is unlikely to circulate much outside Germany, I cannot really complain.
'Schattenland' is an elegiac study of a neglected place, achieved without aggressive montage or staged controversy; in other words, an exemplary vindication of low-budget, minimal, digital film-making. I saw this at an institution with a 'digital cinema'; hopefully the future proliferation of these will allow the bypassing of commercial distribution and the considerable expense of producing film prints.
