Volker Koepp
Chronos – Flow of Time
3/7/2026, 5 PM

In Chronos, Volker Koepp reconnects with people from the regions to the east of the Weichsel who he has already called on in many of his films. While looking back at his own oeuvre, he crafts a longitudinal study that sketches out the political upheavals culminating in Russia’s war against the Ukraine in seismographic fashion – a fundamental film about Europe.

Following in the footsteps of Johannes Bobrowski's poems, Volker Koepp shot his first film in 1972 in the historic landscape east of the Vistula River between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, which was called “Sarmatia” in late antiquity. A world that belonged to the Soviet Empire after the Second World War. Later, the director created a whole cycle of films in this area, including Kalte Heimat (Cold Homeland, 1994), Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann (Mr. Zwilling and Mrs. Zuckermann, 1998), and In Sarmatien (In Sarmatia, 2013). These films dealt with encounters with people, their everyday lives, their biographies marked by political upheavals, Nazi terror, the murder of Jews, Stalinist persecution, and new hopes for social change.

Chronos – Flow of Time is a cinematic montage in which the past and present are fragmentarily connected. It is a reunion with people from earlier films in the turmoil of the years 2020–2025 – ultimately marked by the epochal turning point of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, the effects of which we are experiencing in the immediate present.