Born in Berlin, Laura Coppens studied first in Germany and then in Switzerland, where she has made her home both as an academic – her background is in anthropology – and as a filmmaker, via the production company Srikandi Films. Her second feature documentary, Sediments, which premiered at Visions du Réel and was awarded by the jury, much like her previous film Taste of Hope, looks back on her family history, putting an intimate spin on a well-known topic. The personal element against a major historical backdrop should prove appealing to fans of the documentary form, and not just on the festival circuit.
The film is essentially a conversation between Coppens and her grandfather, who describes himself as a “willing participant” from the jump, and happy to be along for the ride without knowing exactly what his granddaughter intends to talk about. He’s confident it will be worthwhile, and makes a point of reminding her he wants to see the finished product, eagerly awaiting the cinematic result of their chats. He’s primarily interested in his words being immortalized on camera because, at his age, he’s afraid his memory might become less reliable as time goes on.
Of course, given the director herself was born in 1980 and hails from Germany, it’s logical to assume at least one topic will be broached, concerning her grandfather’s generation, and he does indeed go into detail about what it was like to live in the Nazi era as someone who was not ideologically aligned with the predominant political party. Then there’s the subsequent time period of the German Democratic Republic, and the hardships of dealing with entities such as the Stasi in East Germany. And, after 1990, the post-reunification epoch, which leads to the film’s main question: how did those decades shape who the Germans are today, as a people?
The story of a single family becomes a portrait of an entire nation over the course of the 20th century. And while that logline may be superficially similar to Edgar Reitz’s epic Heimat project (a self-titled “chronicle of Germany” spanning multiple generations from 1918 to 2000 and filmed in chunks over the course of three decades), Coppens manages to go deeper into the socio-political intricacies, whilst simultaneously delivering a relatively contained piece of work that gets all its points across in less than an hour and a half.
Key to this achievement is her relationship with the interlocutor. Their natural, familial rapport gives a certain flow to the conversation. Through her eyes, we get to watch her grandfather as though he were directly addressing us, providing us with a direct line to the invaluable treasure trove that is his recollection of a famously eventful century for Germany (and, by extension, the rest of the world). He speaks simply yet eloquently, with the resulting film feeling like a fireside chat shared with everyone, perfectly embodying his initial statement about being happy to partake in his granddaughter’s cinematic endeavor.
At once personal and profoundly universal, Sediments is a formidable monument to the power of memory, chronicling a slice of history so that neither the family nor the audience will forget what happened. And at a time when those ideologies of yesteryear keep staging comebacks as though they were past-their-prime rock stars, testimony like the one captured by Coppens becomes even more precious.
Director, Screenwriter, Producer: Laura Coppens
Cinematography: Pierre Reischer, Laura Coppens
Music: Azadeh Zandieh
Sound: Azadeh Zandieh
Production company: Srikandi Films
World sales: Srikandi Films
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Panorama: Middle and Eastern Europe)
In German
81 minutes
