Synopsis
There are two contrasting ways to describe Sarmatia: as a region on the edge of the known world – that's how the old Greeks saw it -, or as the part of Europe where the once carefully measured geographical centre of the continent is. However, you will probably look in vain for Sarmatia in your school atlas, it doesn’t exist as an administrative unit, and Google Maps won't help either. Yet Sarmatia is not a chimera.Volker Koepp travelled there for his new film, generously allowing us to share his impressions and encounters in a both unknown and nearby region between Lithuania and Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland, which borders on the Baltic in the North and the Black Sea in the South. This historic landscape has long made frequent appearances in his work, at least since 1972, when he made 'Grüße aus Sarmatien für den Dichter Johannes Bobrowski' (Greetings from Sarmatia for the Poet Johannes Bobrowski). Like Bobrowski, Volker Koepp recognises it as "that dreamland where all nations and religious would find their place if history had not ploughed it all up over and over again". The rifts left by all this, especially in the people who live there, and how these people still manage to shine from inside, is beautifully depicted here. (DOKLeipzig/Ralph Eue)