In the presentation of this film project, I wrote in 2019:
On a trip for a film, we set out for Ukraine in 2012, to Odessa, on the coast of the Black Sea. After a few weeks, we arrived in the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast, the former northern East Prussia. On the way, we filmed in the Ukrainian cities Uman, Chernivtsi, and Lviv, in Lublin, Poland, in Hrodno, Belarus, in Lithuania, and finally in Kaliningrad (Königsberg) and Sovetsk (Tilsit). On the Baltic Sea, in Svetlogorsk (Rauschen) and on the Curonian Spit, we ended our work. The film is called IN SARMATIEN.
Before I made films, I read poetry. In 1963, I found a book: ‘Sarmatische Zeit’ (‘Sarmatian Time’) was written in red typeface on the small, black clothbound volume. The poet: Johannes Bobrowski. I found the country of Sarmatia drawn on a map from late antiquity in the 1898 edition of the Brockhaus encyclopaedia. There, east of the Vistula River, ‘Sarmatia’ stretched from ‘Oceanus Sarmaticus’, the Baltic Sea, all the way down to ‘Pontus Euxinus’, the Black Sea. The Chronos River of antiquity is today’s Memel (Lithuanian: Nemunas, Belorusian: Nemon and in the Kaliningrad region that today belongs to Russia: Neman).
Bobrowski says: ‘Current, I can always only love you...’
Since 1972, alongside shooting films between the Elbe and Oder Rivers, for instance in Wittstock, I have also passed through Sarmatia. I told stories about people’s lives in their landscapes. I met survivors after Hitler’s genocide of the Jews and Stalin’s terror in the Ukraine. Biographies which were marked by political and geographic upheavals and turning points in the miserable 20th century. And then, among younger people, the 21st century as well. Hopes that arose thirty years ago after the supposed end of the Cold War evaporated again after developments in recent times. In many places, we are experiencing something like a shift towards authoritarian and anti-democratic structures. In other words, attempts to make history forgotten.
Bobrowski: ‘People, you speak of forgetting – the elderberry tree may die from your forgetfulness...’
When the film IN SARMATIEN was in cinemas, Russia brought war back to the middle of Europe in 2014 with its annexation of Crimea. A shrug of the shoulders is not allowed here.
It is time to set out once again to my Sarmatian places with CHRONOS. The people I met on earlier film shoots have always remained close to me. On our journey, we will be able to further accompany some of their lives. And meet new people.
Now it is 2026:
CHRONOS – FLUSS DER ZEIT (CHRONOS – FLOW OF TIME) is an unintentional ‘long-term project’. The shooting began in 2020 and was supposed to be finished in 2021. First, the pandemic caused countless delays and interruptions – some of the planned shooting locations in the Kaliningrad region were no longer reachable. Russian children and women and friends from the earlier films now seemed to have disappeared. The political developments in the middle of Europe were increasingly threatening.
Then came the unfathomable: the extension of the Russian war into all of Ukraine. To Odessa, Uman, Lviv, and Chernivtsi. Years of horrific images. I went to film with a smartphone in Ukraine, to Chernivtsi. In the end, the work on the film continued into the present of the year 2026. It will soon be 12 years since the start of the war after the annexation of Crimea. The everyday horror of the Russian war crimes on television. The hope of seeing the end of the war has not been fulfilled.
Volker Koepp
