The Village of Swimming Cows

Three young Berliners associated with the Spirit Center, which looks after the spiritual development of its members through yoga, meditation, shamanic rituals and survival lessons in the forest, decide to go to the Polish countryside and to try to survive here. As befits true pilgrims, Ellen, Mario and Jon head east to an area on the Poland-Belarus border, where they rent a 100-year-old wooden house from a farmer named Stanisław. They want to spend the summer there, working in the fields and in contact with nature and a culture that they consider unspoiled by civilization. Trzaska portrays the visitors and the locals as two different tribes that look upon one another with distrust through which also emerges a mutual fascination. From the point of view of the farmers, the Germans appear as harmless nuts (how can you not eat meat and bathe naked in front of the entire village?), whose sophistication and freedom can, however, be envied. While the Germans discover that running a farm is not a romantic idyll but rather hard work-but on their own land. Different lifestyles, different values, different languages, even different music-is there anything that these two different worlds have in common? Is it perhaps just the dream that somewhere lies a better, truer way of life?