AM SEIDENEN FADEN
Deutschland 2004 – Director: Katarina Peters – Original language: German – Subtitles: English – Length: 111 min.
Boris and Katarina are a young, happy couple, full of plans and ideas, pursuing their shared artistic passions. She is a 40-year-old Berlin artist and filmmaker; he is a 33-year-old composer and cellist about to sign a contract in New York. It all starts as a home-video of the newly-weds on their trip to New York. Suddenly Boris collapses and their entire world is turned upside down. Boris is suffering from a life threatening brain-stem stroke. He is locked inside his own brain. He can hear but is unable to move or communicate; his chances of recovery seem very slim.
Katarina intuitively takes up her camera to record a video diary of the tragedy that hits them. From a realistic point of view she meticulously documents her husband's arduous fight to find a path back to the outside world. To represent her own state of mind, her feelings of hope and despair, love and hate, responsibility and guilt, she chooses dream-sequences and metaphorical scenes where she is sitting, knitting what turns out, in the course of the film, to be the shape of a "brain", in silk thread (seidenen Faden). Very personal words and pictures convey this emotional story of a coming back to life.
"How can I go out and lead an active life, while he is paralyzed and fighting with the most trivial questions of his existence in a state of isolation? And if it is correct what the doctors say: This state may last unchanged? What if we both become depressive and fall back in a state of speechlessness?" (Katarina Peters)
"It is amazing how beautiful it is to come back to life." (Boris Baberkoff)
"Wildly cinematic, Stroke is an emotional tour de force." (Karen Tisch, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival)
Awards: Silver Dove, Award of the Ecumenical Jury, FIPRESCI-Award and Award of the Youth Jury from the Filmschule Leipzig e.V., Int. Festival für Dokumentar- und Animationsfilm, Leipzig 2004; Award of the DEFA-Foundation, 26. Max Ophüls Filmfestival, Saarbrücken 2005; New Berlin Film Award, Achtung Berlin Filmfestival, Berlin 2005
English/Original Title: Stroke. Writer: Katarina Peters. Camera: Katarina Peters, Christopher Rowe bvk. Sound: Boris Baberkoff. Editing: Friederike Anders, Marian Bichler. Music: Boris Baberkoff. Production: Katarina Peters Filmproduktion. Producer: Katarina Peters. Distribution: Salzgeber & Co. Medien GmbH.
