Bahnhof Brest

All the trains stop at Brest-Litovsk station, the frontier-station between Poland and Byelorussia. The individual destinies which cross paths in this anonymous space have lived through all the suffering of two wars and different occupations. These destinies weave the web of History, recalled by the archive images of old propaganda films, in which trains were already passing each other. An old man relates how he went from the Nazi camps to the Soviet camps ; a veteran committed suicide, leaving a last message “Farewell, my homeland”, but the new state betrayed him ; a young Russian soldier, back from Germany, returns home in a world he no longer recognizes… But if the grave enameller offers a twenty-year guarantee for the photos which he engraves on the marble tombstones, the taxi driver is without customers because petrol is too expensive… The work of customs officials coping with small tradespeople and smugglers, of the police with those applying for emigration, these are all examples of the changes which highlight the new issues facing the inhabitants of this eternal border region since the collapse of the Soviet Union.