EARTH
Director VICTOR ASLIUK
Countries Belarus, Poland
Duration 30 min
Synopsis
There are places where the Second World War has not been finished yet. On the former battlefields, which are now covered with woods, thousands of soviet soldiers lie unburied. Every year some volunteers come here to search for these human remains. They do that so that they could bury them properly. To dig out bones just in order to bury them again, this apparently absurd cycle opens a new sense. The earth not only reveals the past as the forest ghosts are rising from an archive footage like spirits of those soldiers killed seventy years ago. It is transforming it to the future as teenagers, who have been brought here by their parents, face death for the first time in their lives and yet they start playing war on the spot. The film is an elegy which one more time reminds about frailty of human existence.
There are places where the Second World War has not been finished yet. On the former battlefields, which are now covered with woods, thousands of soviet soldiers lie unburied. Every year some volunteers come here to search for these human remains. They do that so that they could bury them properly. To dig out bones just in order to bury them again, this apparently absurd cycle opens a new sense. The earth not only reveals the past as the forest ghosts are rising from an archive footage like spirits of those soldiers killed seventy years ago. It is transforming it to the future as teenagers, who have been brought here by their parents, face death for the first time in their lives and yet they start playing war on the spot. The film is an elegy which one more time reminds about frailty of human existence.