In the 1990s, many people across Europe greeted the end of the Soviet Union with a sense of liberation and new beginnings. For my family, however, this period unfolded very differently.

In 1992, we arrived in Germany as ethnic German resettlers from Kazakhstan. Our first years were marked by uncertainty. We lived in temporary shelters, and everything had to be rebuilt from scratch: language, work, daily life. Qualifications lost their value, and entire biographies had to be rewritten.

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I remember men from our community setting off eastward in aging cars, chasing the promise of quick money. Trade seemed to offer opportunity, but often led into a world shaped by instability, violence, and risk. One of them, only slightly older than I am today, never returned. He was later found murdered near the Russian-Polish border. These fragments of memory settled deep within me long before I could fully grasp their meaning.

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With Risen from Ruins, I look back at the aftermath of reunification, at a time when West German investors acquired East German industries only to dismantle them for profit. In Russia, former state officials, ex-KGB operatives, and Western businessmen divided up what had once been public property. What emerged was a mafia-like oligarchy that continues to shape Russian politics today and fuels a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine.

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Yet this film is not about geopolitical processes. It is about the people who had to find their way through this upheaval. A generation marked by dislocation and unresolved wounds, wounds that are resurfacing today in troubling and often violent ways. I see an East Germany that has become fertile ground for the far-right AfD, a party steadily gaining influence across the country. I see members of my own Russian-German community drawn toward it, susceptible to narratives and propaganda that echo across borders.

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This is painful to witness, and it has led me to a persistent question: where does this rupture of trust originate? I believe that part of the answer lies buried in the 1990s, a decade defined both by hope and by missed opportunities.