D is for Division

Where borders divide memory, history, and belonging

Set against the eastern border of the European Union, D is for Division reflects on how political lines shape memory, identity, and perception. The film begins with a black and white archival photograph taken in 1940, showing Latvian woman Hermine Purina shielding her son with her body moments before she was killed during the Soviet invasion of Latvia. This image, bearing witness to the first civilian victim of that invasion, becomes the conceptual starting point for an exploration of borders that are both geographical and mental.

Almost eighty years later, Latvian author Davis Simanis travels across the contemporary border separating Latvia and Russia. Through encounters on both sides, the film exposes sharply contrasting interpretations of shared history. For some, the events captured in the photograph symbolise liberation and the beginning of a victorious war. For others, they mark the loss of freedom and the arrival of occupying forces. Celebration and mourning coexist across the same line.

As Simanis moves through border zones, the film assembles a series of revealing situations. A surveillance post monitoring migrants seeking entry into Europe, a religious procession opposing the glorification of war, and the filming of a fictional thriller involving Islamist terrorists in the Latvian countryside all illustrate humanity’s tendency to invent and reinforce invisible divisions. These scenes form a landscape of imagined and enforced boundaries where conflicting worldviews collide.

Premiered at Visions du Réel in 2018, D is for Division offers a sober and unsettling meditation on Europe’s eastern edge, revealing how history continues to resonate in the present and how borders persist long after they are drawn.