Documentary, 90 min.

by Andreas Hoessli, Isabella Huser

Switzerland, February 2002

What goes down in history? What will be remembered; what shapes the contours of an epoch? The 20th century: Pictures, dredged up from the remains of history. Historical events re-staged for the future. Fragments, memories, unpublished documents are intertwined, colliding with and contradicting one another. The result is a new portrayal, a dimension of authentic proximity. The journey through time touches upon the genesis of the atomic bomb, military trials at the end of the war, the functional workings of the lie detector, the discovery of the Majdanek death camp. Einstein speaks, as does the embalmer of Lenin, the KGB agent, and the presumed US spy who made a new life in the Soviet Union. A report based on a dialogue with F., a soldier in the war in ex-Yugoslavia.