Leanders letzte Reise (2017)

After the death of his wife Hilde, 92-year-old Eduard Leander leaves Berlin on a journey to Ukraine to search for the love of his life. Leander’s daughter, Uli, is not enthusiastic about the idea and sends her own daughter, Adele, to the station to talk the old man out of it. But Adele fails to get off the train in time before it heads east. Instead of getting off in Frankfurt an der Oder, she decides to accompany her grandfather on his journey. Eduard had never felt much affection for his daughter or granddaughter, and he had married his wife even though he told her from the very beginning that he did not love her. Nevertheless, Adele grows increasingly interested in her grandfather, his motives, and his past. On the train to Kyiv, Eduard and Adele meet Lew, a young man with a zest for life. He is Russian, grew up in Ukraine, lives in Germany, and feels at home in all these worlds. When Eduard and Adele cannot find a hotel, Lew takes them in with his family. At dinner, he and his father have a loud argument after his father calls the Maidan protesters fascists. Eduard asks them to quiet down. It later emerges that Eduard served as an officer in the Wehrmacht and was the commander of a Cossack cavalry unit. In Kyiv, Lew helps them search for Svetlana, Eduard’s former lover. But the search proves unsuccessful, as does their attempt to obtain Svetlana’s secret police file from the KGB archives and use it to find out where she is. So Eduard, Adele, and Lew set off in Lew’s father’s old BMW for Svetlana’s village near Luhansk. Lew’s brother, who is fighting on the separatists’ side against the Ukrainian army, helps them get free after they are detained by the separatists as suspected spies. Together, they visit Lew’s grandmother. There, the two brothers argue about the political situation. The next morning, before they continue on to the former Cossack village, Lew’s brother tells him to choose a side. From the village, the trail leads on to Russia, which they enter by crossing the green border to avoid lengthy visa formalities. Meanwhile, the political situation is escalating: military vehicles pass them, and the news reports the annexation of Crimea. Three hundred kilometers beyond the border, they finally find Svetlana’s address and her family. Svetlana herself never recovered from the effects of her imprisonment in a gulag and died in 1974. Her daughter and family, however, still live in the house. Eduard, whom Svetlana had told them a great deal about, is welcomed like a hero. He had saved her back then and protected her for a long time during the retreat. Eduard is emotional and relaxed in a way his granddaughter has never seen before. It turns out that Eduard is the father of Svetlana’s daughter. But when Adele remarks that Svetlana’s family is Eduard’s family too, he replies that Adele, her mother, and her grandmother are his family. The mood darkens when Adele asks her grandfather whether he was a perpetrator. In turn, he asks an old Cossack veteran who fought alongside him and has joined the reunion with Svetlana’s family. The veteran answers yes: during the retreat, the company had to defend itself against partisans. The prisoners were shot on Eduard’s orders because, in that situation, he saw no other option. Although deeply disappointed in her grandfather, Adele realizes that she cannot neatly classify Eduard’s role in the war as either good or evil. She says goodbye by embracing Svetlana’s daughter and granddaughter—her own aunt and cousin—before setting off home with Eduard and Lew. On the way toward Kyiv, Eduard dies. Along the way, Lew receives news that his grandmother was killed in a rocket attack in separatist-controlled territory. They meet his brother again, who points the blame at the Ukrainian army. When Eduard’s body is laid beside the dead grandmother in her destroyed apartment block, his daughter Uli arrives from Berlin. Lew takes the two women to the station in Kyiv, but stays behind. As they part, he promises Adele that he will return to Germany soon. It remains unclear whether he will join his brother and the separatists.