Transit Times

24-hour television documentary about Berlin and its inhabitants, reporting in real time on the everyday lives of more than 50 protagonists from a wide range of professions, social classes, religions and ethnicities.

In a small village in the Republic of Moldavia, an old woman dies, leaving her son Petru and her granddaughter Anisoara behind. According to their tradition, the whole village mourns and bids farewell. After the death watch during a stormy night they make their way to the cemetary. The old men carry the heavy coffin over stony paths up to the sacred hill. The sun is high and the way seems endless, but against the thirst there is wine and against the grief there is singing. So in this landscape of paradisal beauty, joy mixes with sorrow and in the end, life stands above death

Anishoara is a 15-year old girl living with her grandfather and little brother in a small village among the rolling green hills of Moldova. Her life is marked by the quotidian rhythms of country life; in summer she feels the overwhelming sensation of first love when on a trip with friends to the melon harvest. In autumn a strange German tourist disrupts her otherwise calm existence.  In winter she travels for the first time to the sea alongside the young man with whom she fell in love. In spring she longs for her lover's return, but when that moment comes it's not what she expected.

After the death of her husband, silence and loneliness reign in this old lady's house. She made routine her best friend and faith her shelter. Only in her dreams she runs away from those four walls to a timeless magic land where the sea speaks without using words. Her days go by like this; between the real life and dreams… until a street dog comes to her door.

In a village hit by drought, Dumitru starts a quest for water. Ioana, the girl who accompanies him in this pursuit, is a silent witness of the baseness of people they meet on their way.

Tracing biographical lines, Volker Koepp steps into his oeuvre, rich in encounters. Returning to Lithuania, Moldova and Chernivtsi, he looks back and brings things up to date, as the war against Ukraine becomes a determining element of the present. Epic.