Levin Peter

Masha survived a suicide attempt — Misha works in the morgue. If her suicide had succeeded, he would have opened her body for the autopsy. But life holds a different twist for them — and this is the story of their summer.

Three stray dogs, four tramps and a limousine without wheels — in the midst of a run-down industrial landscape, not far from the center of Moscow. A ​“pack of strays” — dogs and humans, living from whatever they can find and what has been left behind in seemingly idyllic circumstances. Yet, a building site is rising unpreventably in the background, and soon it threatens to engulf the ​“forgotten garden” where the group is living. As the people increasingly sink into hierarchy quarrels, it seems only the dogs are feeling that their coexistence is in danger. ​“Dreaming Dogs and Barking Men” is an unusual animal-human story in an enchanted place — and tells about what it means when the boundaries of ​“Owner and Dog” begin to blur.

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. According to a legend, she returned to Earth as a ghost and has roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Following her trace, and filmed from a dog’s perspective, SPACE DOGS accompanies the adventures of her descendants: two street dogs living in today’s Moscow. Their story is one of intimate fellowship but also relentless brutality, and is interwoven with unseen archive material from the Soviet cosmic era. A magical tale of voyagers scouting for unknown spaces.

«The earth has a memory», it is once said in this film. It embraces the dead, and with them their memories. Digging for these memories can reveal another life. Not as a document, but as fertile ground for feelings and thoughts. Director Levin Peter spends a lot of time in intense conversations with his grandfather who used to be stationed in the Ukraine as a soldier of the Wehrmacht. Levin travels there, looking to trace and excavate what he has heard. What he has heard are the kind of tales that can haunt you in old age. Returning to the same places today, old pictures become exposed spectres. What follows is an attempt to uncover, to imagine and to endure biographical anomalies. At the end of this process, both will have an altered view of the fissures and flaws of a human life. A film about the search for those spectres that we call memories. ​„Beyond the Snowstorm“ shows how those memories of our grandparents, seldom or never talked about, can still influence the lives of others today, especially their grandchildren. A film about the difficult balance between the unconditional search for truth and the fragile bonds between us as human beings.