Outskirts

War and poetry, cobbler's nails and revolution. The catastrophe of the First World War descends on a sleepy provincial backwater somewhere in Russia. And the cobbler has always worked there, in this petit-bourgeois hole. On Sundays, the women stroll by the village pond. Russians and Germans live together peacefully alongside one another as next-door neighbours. Suddenly, however, the cobbler's sons have to depart to the front, and the old German has to abandon his house. Not long afterwards, the first prisoners of war arrive. The cobbler's daughter gets involved with one of them, and some of the Russians almost beat the life out of him. But her father needs him: "He is not a German, he's a cobbler!" At some point, the soldiers at the front become tired of fighting: the revolutionary spark ignites the spirit of revolution at home, too. The German and the Russian cobblers march as one. (Berlinale)