TRAUMZEIT

Bare trees, flooded ground, low sky, dark colours: the landscape passes by, then a face with closed eyes, then a dilapidated house. This intriguing beginning sets up the theme, not that of the dream in the literal sense but that of utopia. The dreamer, an architect, tells the story of her dreamlike, real, past and present city, located in the former GDR on the Polish border: “In 1953, around the steel mill, we had imagined building the ideal socialist city”. The old plans are followed by images of this modern city: wide avenues almost without cars, buildings without beauty, deserted squares; the ideal city hardly seems ideal. But the counterpoint of this convinced and lucid woman’s speech and wandering gradually lead us to recall a past where all social classes lived together, where “everything must belong to the people”. In the distance, the architect sees the smoke from the factories and the buildings all alike. She does not want to abandon her city, as many others have done, she is drawing up plans to rehabilitate it.
A portrait of a warm woman, inseparable from an emblematic place but above all from a dream of society, in which the filmmaker leads us.