Christian Winkler

For over twenty years, the grandmother of filmmaker Katharina Copony ran a military canteen in southern Styria. She, too, spent part of her childhood among soldiers preparing for war—just as her mother and her mother’s siblings had done before her. *In the Barracks* sketches a multigenerational portrait from a female perspective through brief fragments of memory. Personal experiences, narrated off-screen, and reenactments featuring child actors reconstruct, within the present-day context of barracks life, an extended family history spanning from the postwar period to the late 1970s. A film of memory narrated by a collective voice.

The film tells the story of two friends meeting in the countryside after 16 years, accompanied by a third person, to dig a well. They start to talk, but at the same time they remain silent about their common past, their connection and their separation. Digging is about the past and the present, about friendship and the unique laws of one friendship in particular, impenetrable to those who stand outside it.