I grew up in Yangon. In February 2021, my dreams came to an end. My mother said: “Son, wake up. The military has taken over the country”. The days got darker. The window in my narrow room and the piece of sky I watched seemed to be the only freedom I had left. I wanted to say something about this new undercurrent in my life. I wrote things down, recorded my voice, and searched for images that might reflect my feelings and those of other young people. And now there is a film which conveys what it's like to lose the ground beneath your feet.
Invited by a mysterious friend, a film team sets out on a journey into a hidden Yenish Europe that stretches from dusty banlieues in France to the forests of Carinthia. Told by the voices of young and old Travellers, a kaleidoscopic panorama of their lives unfolds: Diverse people relate to each other, bound together by their love of freedom but also by deep wounds from the past. Their otherness is mirrored and reflected not least in the exchange between the filmmakers and the Yenish.
The Zimmerwald Conference – mired in legend in the Soviet Union and erased from history in Zimmerwald itself. A labyrinth of forgetting and remembering from which history is made.
When Lenin and Trotsky met in the small village of Zimmerwald, it was not to watch birds, contrary to what they claimed. The conference was a call to the workers of the world to unite against the war that was raging in Europe. This page of Switzerland's history has long been forgotten, but new generations, such as the ones portrayed in this film, are willing to recover it.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.