Of all the filmmakers to receive retrospectives at the Play-Doc International Film Festival in recent years, Germany’s Viola Stephan is the least known. And while discovering forgotten directors is one of the joys of attending this small but smartly-curated nonfiction-focused festival Stephan’s obscurity presents a unique challenge for critics and historians who may assume that the story of art cinema of the 1990s, and of films from that era about post-Soviet culture and the sociopolitical currents between Germany and the former USSR, has already been written.
