• Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



  • Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



  • Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



  • Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



  • Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



  • Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



  • Leaving and Staying

    Leaving and Staying



Leaving and Staying

by Volker Koepp

Leaving and Staying

Germany | 2023 | 178:00 min

Original Title:
GEHEN UND BLEIBEN

Formal Categories

Human Interest Arts

Content Categories

Documentary
Synopsis
In Uwe Johnson’s last study in the English town of Sheerness, there was a map of Mecklenburg on the wall – the region of his childhood, to which he never returned after his emigration to the West and could only reconstruct in the literary sense afterwards. Volker Koepp’s film is conceived as a geobiography: he travels with Johnson’s texts to places from the author’s life, finding people and landscapes connected to his work and his person, sometimes closely, sometimes more loosely. Koepp’s and Johnson’s poetic projects intertwine: their landscapes and biographies resist linear progression; history remains stored in them only to reveal itself again and again. For Johnson, when he swims in the Baltic Sea, the dead are present, floating in the Bay of Lübeck after the 1945 sinking of the Cap Arcona. Koepp speaks with a woman who recalls how holidaying in Italy evoked thoughts of those fleeing across the Mediterranean by boat. Johnson’s sorrow at the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops is mirrored in Russia’s ongoing attack on Ukraine, which affects the filming. When a river flows slowly, it can change direction with even just a little wind and return to its source. ( catalogue text by Jan Künemund, 53 Berlinale Forum @ 73 BERLINALE)
With Judith Zander, Peter Kurth, Heinz Lehmbäcker, Hanna Lehmbäcker, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Festivals/Awards
2023
73 BERLINALE – Forum
32 FILMKUNSTFEST MV
Cast and Crew
  • Director Volker Koepp
  • Screenwriter Barbara Frankenstein
  • Director of Photography Uwe Mann
  • Editor Christoph Krüger
  • Sound Stephan Settele
Original Languages

German

Links / Reference
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