The Woman with the 5 Elephants

Swetlana Geier is considered the greatest translator of Russian literature into German. Her new translations of Dostoyevsky’s five great novels, known as the “five elephants”, are her life’s work and literary milestones. Her work is characterised by a great and sensual feeling for language and uncompromising respect for the writers she translates. At the same time, she is aware that every translation is finally an incomplete work bound to the era of its creation. Now the eighty-six-year old woman is making her first trip since the war back to the places of her childhood in the Ukraine. The film interweaves the story of Swetlana Geier’s life with her literary work and traces the secret of this inexhaustible mediator of language. —Viennale