D’Est

“When I make a documentary film, I become an empty sponge, soaking up everything.” D’Est is a road movie made up almost entirely of still lifes. Chronologically and without commentary, Chantel Akermann ties together her subjective impressions on a journey from West to East. She travels through Poland, Ukraine and Russia; from a summer day in East Germany to wintery Moscow, from carefree fun at the beach, through agrarian landscapes, all the way to snowy streets in the big city. The director filmed the things along the way that moved her – trees and bridges, men and women, the old and the young, in their living rooms and kitchens, out in the fields and dancing in the evening. The camera keeps its distance. The highlight of the travelogue is a travelling shot several minutes in length along labourers waiting at a bus station in Moscow, a cross-section of post-Soviet society.
In 1993, Akerman said: “Amid all that, I will show the faces that are isolated from the crowd, have something unaffected about them, so often express the opposite of the uniformity that sometimes strikes one with a crowd, and therefore the opposite of our uniformity.”