BEHIND WORDS

(D 2005) 90 mins / colour / Digi-Beta / 16:9

Dir.: John Burgan
Producer: Andrea Ufer
Funds: Netzwerk Migration + Stiftung Mercator + Bundeskulturstiftung
TV Partner: MDR

SYNOPSIS:

In the last century alone a staggering eighty to one hundred million people in Europe were forced to leave their homes because they were of the wrong race, nationality, religion, social group or political conviction. Refugees, displaced people, asylum seekers: mass expulsions have marked the twentieth century from the Armenian tragedy during the First World War through to the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkan Wars of the 1990’s. “You have to deal with the past” says Nenad Puhovski in Zagreb, Croatia, “...because if you don’t, it comes back”. But how to come to terms with this mass phenomenon: in public on a local, national or international level; or privately, as individuals and in families? The question is not easily answered, but this is the starting point to a film which is less an academic treatise than a journey of exploration.

British director John Burgan’s journey takes him across the continent, from an encounter in Bosnia with a midwife who returned to the home town where she had lost 23 members of her family barely five years previously; to conversations in the north and the south of Cyprus, still divided after 30 years; exploring a “Museum of Barbarism” and a sealed Berlin bunker, the site of a planned “Centre against Expulsions”; to meetings with novelists, poets and artists in Sarajevo, Gdansk, Istanbul, Berlin, Wroclaw; following the traces of lost cultures on the Greek islands, the former Smyrna and Asia Minor. The "place" of the refugee is neither the homeland they have left behind, nor their future destination, but the road. Behind Words pieces fragments together, tales of flight and expulsion to explore Europe’s collective memory.