
The Year Before the War

Stylized as silent cinema, the film connects political and philosophical extremes of 1913 in a story of a young man participating at the creation of a new world. This mysterious adventurer, who was known as Peter the Lett, gets involved in a tragicomic and surreal race from a routine clerk job and a romantic passion in Riga to preparation of the world revolution in Vienna, psychoanalysis at Freud’s salon and seduction of Mata Hari in Paris.
[IFFR] A kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, or perhaps a journey into madness that Hans (or his doppelgänger Peter) starts over one year. The year before the outbreak of WWI, to meet characters like Freud, Lenin or a possible Mata Hari. Everything is mysterious and absurd, a carnival representation that indicates a mental disease, maybe. There is an intention of deconstruction of Europe, although not entirely convincing.