Learning to Milk a Cow

2016

1h 4min

A daring documentary delving into the experiences of a Ukrainian forced labourer in Germany during World War II, exploring themes of love, loss, and profound longing. When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive the hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, and falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with the acousmatic effect of disembodied voices, in this deeply intimate portrait obscured by memory loss, mistranslation, fear and trauma.