Bestemming Moskou

The starting point of destination moscow is to show, fifty years from date, the effects of the most atrocious war in the history of our civilization: the Second World War. The makers felt that the form of a travelogue would enable them to expose the true dimensions of the violence and the effects of a war in a completely new and different way. A war is never short-lived and never without far-reaching consequences, not even for postwar generations. The Second World War has left its marks on every piece of landscape, on every town between Normandy and Moscow. All the people who live there and who went through the war can tell the stories about how that war changed or destroyed their lives. In kaleidoscopic images the places and landscapes pass by: Normandy, the Sigfrid line, Cologne, Dresden, Berlin, Cracow, Auschwitz, Warsaw, Brest, the snowy and icy Russian woods and fields, Minsk, and Moscow. People who live in these places tell us what happened: a German soldier who has been a prisoner of war, civilians who lost their families in air raids, Germans who have been in concentration camps, Polish convicts, a Jewish historian who has been working on a study on the atrocities against his people for all his life, Russians who fought with the Partisans as a child. Testimonies that show that wars are never short-lived and never lead to anything. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)