Focus: Borders is a competition dedicated to medium and feature-length fiction, animated, and hybrid films distinguished by a strong authorial voice and a search for original ways of telling stories about the contemporary world. The diversity of approaches to long-form cinema presented in the selected works proves that film still has much to offer. This year’s competition features 8 titles.

Memory Hotel, reż. Heinrich Sabl (France, Germany) 2024, 101’, 18+

May 1945. Five-year-old Sophie and her parents flee Germany ahead of the advancing Soviet front line. On their way to a ship bound for America, they stop at a hotel where two Nazis are hiding. A violent confrontation breaks out, during which the girl loses both her parents and her memory. Soon, Soviet troops arrive and occupy the building, raising Sophie to be their cook. Over the years, as she grows, Sophie gradually regains her memory when she encounters one of the Nazis again.

It took 25 years to make this stop-motion animation! But the idea itself dates back another five years earlier, to the time when Russian troops, after 50 years of occupation, finally withdrew from East Germany. That symbolic event, marking the fall of the Iron Curtain, was hailed by many as “the end of history”. Yet Heinrich Sabl, the director of “Memory Hotel”, observed that after the initial celebrations, disappointment set in – old divisions were replaced by new ones, merely pushing the past further away. Collective memory reaches back only about forty years, and reclaiming earlier memories becomes an act of searching for one’s own identity — symbolized in the film by the character of Sophie.

Wallace and Gromit meet Emir Kusturica’s “Underground”! All of this comes together in the wild, unsettling yet deeply rewarding stop-motion experience that is “Memory Hotel”.

Film awarded at DOK Leipzig.

After the screening, we invite you to join a discussion.