Jahre der Kälte

Very personal and originally-made documentary in which the film-maker tells a more general story about the oppression of political activists in East Germany via his father. Horst Schüppel was imprisoned as a 23-year-old teacher and disappeared via various Germany jails into the Arctic Soviet prison camp Workuta, sentenced to five times life imprisonment. When West Germany entered into diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1955, he was released. He was never able to talk about his time in camp with his son, who later became film-maker. Years after his death, the son follows the trail back in the isolation and cold with the eye of a film-maker. Conversations with surviving fellow prisoners of Horst Schüppel soberly recorded on video are juxtaposed in the film with impressions of Workuta and other places he was imprisoned shot on super8.