MindJazz Pictures has acquired German distribution rights to director Lena Calve’s The Immigrant Within ahead of its world premiere at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival on Monday. It will be released in theaters in Germany on May 14th.
Kalbe spent nearly four years traveling undercover to Moscow to document the experiences of three psychologists who were simultaneously maintaining an anonymous crisis hotline at the outbreak of the Ukraine war and struggling to reconcile their own beliefs with the harsh demands of a totalitarian regime.
Kalbe, who himself was born and raised in Russia (now a German citizen), wanted to find out why Russia’s silent majority remained silent as the war in Ukraine was in full swing. “Are they colluding or – as many Russians say – ‘neutral’?” Kalbe asks.
The director says that “Inner Immigrant” is a “cautionary tale.”
“What we see in Russia today is that silence allows totalitarian regimes to grow stronger,” she says. “It shows how quickly civil liberties can be dismantled and repression can become the norm, as the majority chooses to turn inward rather than openly resist.”
Holger Rectenwald, managing director of MindJazz Pictures, said the film “offers a rare and intimate insight into the psychological inner world of a society living under massive propaganda and state repression since the invasion of Ukraine.”
It begs the question, “What does silence, conformism, and ‘internal migration’ mean in a totalitarian system?”, Recktenwald added.
The film was “a highly relevant film for German audiences; it sheds light on the mechanisms of authoritarian regimes, highlights the psychological tensions in the context of war and propaganda, and at the same time opens up space for a respectful discussion of responsibility, complicity, resistance, and empathy, without relativizing or obscuring the structures of perpetrator and victim.”
Inner Immigrants was produced by Calbe Film and Makalbe Film in co-production with See Through Film, in collaboration with Berlin-Brandenburg State Broadcasting and German National Broadcasting Corporation, with support from the Bavarian National Center for Film and Video Animation, FFA Film Fernsanstalt and La Legion. Ile d’France and the German Film Institute (DFFF).
This is Karbe’s second full-length documentary. Her first film, Black Mambas (2022), had its world premiere at CPH:DOX and won an F:ACT Award.
