Synopsis
On 1 June 2009 a passenger plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. My cousin Georg, returning from Brazil, was among the 228 dead. He grew up as an adopted child in a small Italian village in the midst of the Dolomites; he had travelled to the city of Salvador da Bahia on the coast of Brazil in search of his biological mother. Seven years later his adoptive brother, Markus, crosses the ocean to follow Georg’s footprints into his own past.The drama is reflected in geological dimensions, in primeval depths. Where does mankind’s desire to learn how the world was created come from? Where do we come from? There is stardust, the primary matter, the answer to the question, in the rocks at the bottom of the ocean. The origin of all life can be studied, but not necessarily the origin of an individual life.
Martin Prinoth took his film to the bottom of the sea – where the primary stone is found. And where his cousin Georg’s body sank when he was killed in a plane crash over the Atlantic in 2009. Georg was adopted, like his brother Markus. They were born in Brazil and moved into a village in the Dolomites when they were small children, with no knowledge of their origin and who were or are their biological mothers. “The Fifth Point of the Compass” goes on an exceptionally sensitive and attentive quest for the roots and identities of its protagonists – from South Tyrol to Brazil and finally to the bottom of the ocean. [DOK Leipzig]