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Title: The Woman with the 5 Elephants (2009)
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| Credited cast: | |||
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Svetlana Geier | ... | Self |
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Anna Götte | ... | Self |
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Hannelore Hagen | ... | Self |
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Jürgen Klodt | ... | Self |
| Rest of cast listed alphabetically: | |||
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Johannes Geier | ... | Self (archive footage) |
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Fyodor Ivanovich Mikhaylov | ... | Self (archive footage) |
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Sofiya Nikolaevna Mikhaylova | ... | Self (archive footage) |
First her father ends up in one of Stalin's prison camps, then young Svetlana herself experiences the German invasion. In order to survive she learns German at home in Kiev. She is good and gets work as a translator before ending up in a German camp in 1943. Now, 65 years later, she is a renowned translator who in her twilight years has translated the great works of Dostoevsky. For the first time in all these years, she returns to Kiev together with her granddaughter. Written by Göteborg International Film Festival
Svetlana Geier, the protagonist of this documentary, is known for her praised re-interpretations of dostojevskys books from Russian to German. Thus she has very interesting things to say about language, literature and life. Moreover, growing up in Kiev she witnessed, how her family and friends fell victim to the stalinist purge and the German occupation, while she herself was one of the very few eastern europeans actually being promoted by the Nazi regime with a scholarship in Germany.
Unfortunately, this great material is presented in an unstructured an ill-paced manner. The only narrative frame is the historic one of the 30s and 40s. Everything else is shown in an arbitrary order. This is tolerable as long as the material is interesting enough to carry itself.
But what's really annoying is the passages, where we see here speaking in Russian to an ukrainian audience. Without subtitles. For minutes. Or we see here looking out of a train's or a taxi's window an speaking to herself in Russian. Without explanation or translation. For minutes. These parts, in total at least 30 minutes, convey hardly any information. In addition, the director very often fails finding pictures which would illustrate the narrated appropriately.
So if this documentary was re-edited, brought into a coherent shape and freed of all the superfluous crap, it would be quite a good one.