According to her deep will of survival, a young woman, who writes down the horrible incidents during the Second World War in Berlin, where the Soviet Soldiers attack it and leads to many havoc and deaths, the thing that challenges her.
The film is well-acted, with restraint, by Hoss and Sidikhin. The writer and director, Max Faerberboeck, employs a level gaze and avoids for the most part artificial sentimentality. The physical production is convincing.
An honourable effort to illustrate a period in post-war German history that remained conveniently shrouded for years.
Chicago Reader
October 02, 2009
No one is guiltless-not the Russian commander (Yevgeny Sidikhin) who takes the heroine as his lover, nor her bourgeois landlady (Fassbinder alumnus Irm Hermann), who welcomes the occupiers for their black market goods.
Though the story is based in truth, an emotionally removed Hoss feels more like a symbol than an actual person, while her detached narration keeps us at further remove.
The suffering of these Berlin women, however tragic, is decontextualized from the infinitely greater crimes against humanity's millions by Germany at the time, which in fact was responsible for their fate.
A clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.
