VARIA: "GRENZE/BORDER"

GRENZE/GRANICA

D: Susanna Zdrzałek, CI,ED: Fritz Fechner, DE 2015, COL, DOC, 43’34’’

A Polish female volleyball team and a coach that doesn't speak Polish. A hospital in Brandenburg, where Polish doctors encounter Polish patients. An artist who “terminates” the border and creates a new, common space. “GRENZE/GRANICA” is a visual journey along the Polish-German border. It begins in Szczecin and leads as far as Görlitz and Zgorzelec. Throughout its 45 minutes, the documentary shows seven examples of Polish-German life – from various angles, but always from a German and Polish point of view. The border is open – how does this influence the people who live here? Free of prejudice, the film documents life in a region that wants to be something more than just the outskirts of Poland or Germany – it is, after all, the centre of Europe.

Susanna Zdrzałek

Susanna Zdrzałek was born in 1989 in Piekary Śląskie. When she was one year old, she moved with her parents to Germany. As a child she held her own radio broadcasts in her room, and as a thirteen-year-old she began writing for a local newspaper. After her matura exams she started studying journalism and political studies in Dortmund. She was a trainee at the office of the German television ARD in New York and the ARD office in Warsaw, where she later studied and simultaneously worked as a journalist, reporting from various regions in Poland. Zdrzałek was a reporter for the German public television ZDF and a journalism coach in Ghana as well as Shanghai. Currently she is a reporter and editor for the public television WDR. She lives in Düsseldorf. “GRENZE/GRANICA” is her first documentary film.

Fritz Fechner