Earth

In the thawed-out forest, a group of teenagers is digging the ground. What was formerly the mud of trenches conceals a whole contingent, which the youngsters’ spades now unearth bone by bone. The fact that the remains of the filmmaker’s grandfather have lain somewhere in a similar forest since 1945 is certainly not without importance. But the powerful framing and inventive editing take the film beyond this initial motivation. Exhuming only to rebury: this apparently absurd cycle opens up a plurality of meanings as the film progresses. In an interview for the 2010 Journal du Réel, the filmmaker spoke of Belarus as a “country of graves, a land of endless wars” where “Swedish and German knights, Napoleonic soldiers and the Russian army are buried”. Asliuk deals with matter from close up, both visually and in terms of sound. Earth not only uncovers the past (out of context, the archive footage has the furtive splendour of mysterious comings and goings) but also prolongs it into the future – the youngsters who were so moved when unearthing the bones are seen playing war games in another sequence.