Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann

Czernowitz, once the ‘city of people and books’, was the centre of Jewish culture in Bukovina, a border region characterised for centuries by a mixture of peoples. Only a few of them survived deportation and extermination in the concentration camps - among them 90-year-old Rosa Roth-Zuckermann and almost 70-year-old Matthias Zwilling. Evening after evening, the two friends, who are also connected by the German language, talk about their everyday lives, their memories, their lives - she, the optimist, he, the pessimist - and they do so in such an enchanting way that the result is an enormously relatable, beautiful, simply heart-warming film that reveals the misery and hope of an entire century. (Florian Widegger)