REVISION

In June 1992 the corpses of two Romanian men were discovered in a field in Mecklenburg-Pomerania, close to Germany’s border with Poland. Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar had both been shot. Some 20 years later, director Philip Scheffner looks for clues. Was it really a hunting accident, as the German authorities were quick to state? And on what grounds, exactly, did a court acquit the two hunters involved – in a trial, moreover, about which not even the two victims’ relatives were notified? Scheffner’s scrutiny of the events and the police investigation might be termed a renewed examination, or an appeal for justice. Meticulously reconstructing the puzzling details of the case, he questions witnesses, detectives and experts. In particular he focuses on the families of the two men in whom little interest was shown up to now. As well as querying the facts, this “examination” also questions its own filmic means of investigation. Instead of actual interviews we see the interviewees subsequently watching the recorded footage, so that they have the chance to add comments or even question their own words. All this adds up to a dense network of perspectives – and a frighteningly topical picture of a disquieting aspect of Germany’s present-day reality.