Seestück (OmeU)

There is a famous predecessor for Volker Koepp’s exploration of the Baltic Sea: “he must have stood here”, a man says, speaking about a vantage point for one of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the artist so strongly associated with Romanticism. If you spend time along the shores of the sea surrounded by Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, the Baltic states and the Russian enclave Kaliningrad, there will inevitably be associations to the big skies and stormy waves of Friedrich’s take on nature. But Koepp is a man of the technical (and industrial) age, and as much as he and some of his protagonists might personally yearn for the construed innocence of “nature”, he is well aware of what is going on in the region. After all, he has filmed here, between the Curonian Split and his hometown Greifswald, for decades. SEESTÜCK is a bit of a summary, a wonderfully somber, yet warm testimony to a way of life shaped by the sea: Koepp talks to fishermen and ecologists, to sailors and coastal residents, he tries to find out about the tensions of a possible new Cold War and about the impact of the geopolitical energy wars, and in all that he contemplates the mysteries of mankind – possibly only an “interglacial mistake”, but somehow the only creature able to make sense of the Baltic Sea in a marvelous movie. (Bert Rebhandl)

In the presence of Volker Koepp and Barbara Frankenstein (co-author)