A young woman is forced to radically reassess her life in the wake of a random tragedy in All Russians Love Birch Trees, the second feature from German writer-director Pola Beck. This emotionally raw character study is based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Olga Grjasnowa, first published in Germany in 2012, which became an award-winning best-seller and feted theatre adaptation.
Beck has only two feature credits to date, but her solid screen portfolio includes working as show-runner on the high-rating German TV teen drama Druck and co-directing the prize-winning Netflix miniseries The Last Word. World premiering at the Munich Film Festival this week, All Russians Love Birch Trees should do respectable business in Germany, where the book is a known quantity. Domestic distribution is being handled by Port Au Prince, whose past releases include Nora Fingscheidt’s prize-winning System Crasher (2019). But elsewhere, the film may struggle to attract audiences, especially with that unfortunate Russia-linked title, an entire nation now inescapably tainted by Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Aylin Tezel stars as Mascha, a thirtysomething woman in grief-stricken freefall, haunted by feverish dreams of ex-lovers. We first meet her in Tel Aviv, swimming in the sea and partying at throbbing techno clubs, where she brushes off approaches from male suitors for a lusty lesbian affair with Amazonian Israeli beauty Tal (Yuval Scharf). Mascha’s new lover takes her on wild motorcycle rides into the desert, teaches her to shoot a machine gun, and other delicious escapist thrills. But behind the hedonistic buzz, there are ominous signs that Tal is not the solid emotional rock that Mascha needs in her shipwrecked life right now.
As Beck rewinds the story six months, we meet the Mascha of old, a respected UN translator living and working in Germany, with a more settled social life and a hot boyfriend, Elias (Slavko Popadic). Her future seems mapped out, but when a wrenching loss hits her out of the blue, all that is solid melts into air. Mascha leaves her former life behind and jumps on a plane to Israel, reconnecting with her ancestral bloodline as a former Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe. Beck and her team cross-cut between these two timelines, withholding the full details of the tragedy for as long as possible, even though the outcome is fairly obvious as soon as a minor medical issue becomes a nagging plot point.
Grjasnowa’s source novel was primarily a tragicomic rumination on the social and psychological experience of being an immigrant. Born in Azerbaijan during the twilight years of Soviet Russian rule, the author and her family were part of a mass exodus of Jewish refugees who relocated to western Europe after the collapse of Communism, many fleeing civil war and persecution. On the page, Mascha and her peer group of fellow exiles detail their prickly everyday experiences as strangers in a strange land, with family tensions, racism and violence never too far away.
Burkhardt Wunderlich’s screenplay retains most of the book’s essential plot but downplays this central focus on the wounded immigrant psyche, immersing viewers instead in the sensual rush, sensory dislocation and unexpected libidinal surges of Mascha’s grief. Its a cinematic rather than a literary treatment of the material, which is logical, but something is definitely lost in translation by the dilution of these deeper social and political dimensions.
There is a pleasing symmetry in the casting of Tezel as Mascha, a full decade after she starred in Beck’s feature debut Breaking Horizons (2012). Her shellshocked, intense performance feels authentic and finely honed. Agile, whirling camerawork and dreamy, loopy editing ensure that All Russians Love Birch Trees is an engaging visual exercise throughout, even if Beck’s handsome distillation of Grjasnowa’s novel ultimately feels like a light-footed dance around some very heavy themes.
Venue: Munich Film Festival
Director: Pola Beck
Screenwriter: Burkhardt Wunderlich, from the novel by Olga Grjasnowa
Cast: Aylin Tezel, Sohel Altan Gol, Slavko Popadic, Yuval Scharf, Bardo Böhlefeld
Cinematography: Juan G. Sarmiento
Editing: Philipp Thomas
Music: Johannes Repka
Producers: Maximilian Leo, Jonas Katzenstein
Production company: Augenschein Filmproduktion GmbH (Germany)
In German, English, Arabic, Hebrew, French, Russian, Turkish
105 minutes
