2011, Documentary, color, 80 min

The Netherlands

Director: Masha Novikova

Producer: Willemijn Cerutti, production Zeppers Film & TV

After every war 
someone has to tidy up. 
Things won’t pick / 
themselves up, after all.

Sweet Smoke of the Fatherland begins with these lines from the poem The End and the Beginning by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska.  The documentary tells the story of three old people from three very different places in Europe: Catalonia, Lithuania and Abkhazia.  People who saw wars come and go and who chose not to take a part in them, but to stay on the sidelines, to cultivate the land and to tidy up.

The three of them live in the place where they were born. They are elderly, poor, living in isolated places.  They feed the chickens and the goats, they cook on a woodstove, they cultivate a bit of land – in as far as they are still capable.  This makes Sweet Smoke of the Fatherland not just a story about war and people’s responses to it, but also about old age and loneliness, about people who feel connected to the soil that produced them and where they have experienced so much.  They keep living there with all their beautiful and painful memories and dreams that, despite everything, they still have.

Movie on IMDB