Revision

In the early morning hours of 29 June 1992 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, two people were found dead by harvest workers in a grain field near the Polish border. Philip Scheffner deals with a detailed reconstruction of the case in his essayistic documentary REVISION. It is about the death of two Romanian Roma who were asylum seekers in Germany. The circumstances that led to the deaths of Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar have still not been clarified. Officially, it was a hunting accident, a tragic mistaking of them for wild boar. The hunters were never convicted. The trial, which dragged on for years and in which crucial questions were not pursued, ended in an acquittal.

Almost twenty years later, Philip Scheffner and Merle Kröger conducted a thorough investigation, unlike the one at the time, with archaeological instincts. In Romania they sought out the relatives of those killed, who only now learned about the details of the circumstances of the deaths and the trial. They made statements about the two victims that no one had been interested in before. Like all the witnesses and experts whom he questioned again, the director gave them the opportunity to listen to and rethink their statements – in contrast to the common practice, which turns statements once made into facts. Scheffner explained this concept in an interview, saying, “We wanted the people we speak to to have the highest degree of control over what they say. We wanted to create a kind of cinematic space that develops a level between us behind the camera, between the people in front of the camera, but ultimately, of course, also for the people in the auditorium by doing the same thing, namely listening to something; so also to shake up the power relations that arise during such an interview.”

In this way, Scheffner not only subjects the case, but also his own medium, to a cinematic revision. With increasingly oppressive density, he weaves a network of landscape, memories, files and “German conditions.”

Image © Svenja L Harten_pong