The Chronos River—the ancient name for the Memel—flows through the region of Sarmatia. Volker Koepp follows its course in search of the fates of the people...
“River, I can only ever love you alone…” (Johannes Bobrowski: *Sarmatian Time*)
The Chronos River—the ancient name for the Memel—flows through the region of Sarmatia. Volker Koepp follows its course in search of the fates of the people who live on its banks—and in doing so, he repeatedly returns to those who have shaped his earlier films. But “Chronos—River of Time” is also a portrait of a region in transition. Filming took over five years. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic shape people’s experiences just as much as the Soviet past and the scars the Holocaust has left on these communities.
Following in the footsteps of Johannes Bobrowski’s poems, Volker Koepp shot his first film in 1972 in the historic landscape east of the Vistula, between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea—a region known as “Sarmatia” in late antiquity. A world that, after World War II, became part of the Soviet Empire. Later, Koepp shot an entire series of films in this region, including “Kalte Heimat” (1994), “Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann” (1998), and “In Sarmatien” (2013). These films dealt with encounters with people, their everyday lives, their life stories shaped by political upheavals, Nazi terror, the murder of Jews, Stalinist persecution, and hopes for social change. “Chronos – Fluss der Zeit” adds a new, decisive chapter to these stories—as a cinematic montage in which the past and present are fragmentarily intertwined.
Germany 2026, 198 min.,
Original multilingual version with German subtitles
Director & Screenplay: Volker Koepp
