D'Est (1993)

Title: From the East

Original Title: D'Est

Release Date: 1993-09-16

Status: Released

Rating: 6.8/10 (from 27 votes)

Language: FR

Genres: Documentary

Production Companies: RTP, Lieurac Productions, Paradise Films, La Sept-Arte, RTBF

In this incisive dispatch from the newly collapsed Soviet empire, bullet holes from WWII still pockmark the old stone buildings. Akerman journeys from East Germany to Moscow between the late summer and winter of 1993 ('while there’s still time'), chronicling in deliberate tracking shots, circular pans, and domestic tableaux yet another moment of radical upheaval in the 20th-century, the faces and bodies of Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians weighed down with obedient resignation and uncertainty.