In a melancholy dialogue with her boyfriend and people she met by chance, the director tries to fathom the secret of love. A wistful and poetical journey to the Caspian Sea.
A filmmaker is searching for a place where she and her boyfriend first went on a date. On this little trip, she meets random people and asks them about love, memories, and the meaning of life. Meanwhile, the pollution of the Caspian Sea pulls her search for answers towards her inner questions about memories, feelings, and happiness.
A consensual union becomes a brutal assimilation that ends in death and a new beginning. Powerfully moving colours and fascinating sounds transport irritating emotions.
In this film, two individuals with strong personalities are ultimately driven to ruin by selfish possessiveness. But in the end, their death, and their rebirth after corruption is just a part of this continuum called natural life, no matter whether their behaviours should be morally criticised or introspected by us.
Film material from the colonial era in Togo is screened in public at the locations where it was shot. What does it tell, what does it conceal? A painful confrontation with German history.
Shortly before the First World War, the German “Africa explorer” and film director Hans Schomburgk embarked on an unprecedented film expedition to West Africa to shoot adventure and documentary films in the exotic setting in the north of the then-German colony of Togo. To this day, his films remain virtually unknown in Togo.
More than a century later, guided by the report of actress Meg Gehrts, we travel with a mobile cinema to the original locations of Schomburgk's film adventures. Together with Togolese viewers, we want to question the film images regarding their historical background and the effects of colonialism. What do they show? And what do they conceal about Togoland, which at the time was praised as the “model colony” of the German Empire?
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.