“Amadoka” tells the story of a man so mutilated in one of the hot spots in Eastern Ukraine that he is barely recognizable — and survives only by miracle. It’s a dubious comfort, as the severe injuries have led to complete memory loss: he remembers neither his name nor his origins, not a single loved one or fragment of his previous life. This is how he is found by a woman whose love and patience can work miracles — reaching into the deepest layers of oblivion and memory, stitching together the torn fragments of a shattered consciousness, and piecing together a shared history.
Amadoka — the largest lake in Europe, located in what is now Ukraine — was first mentioned by Herodotus and reproduced on maps by medieval cartographers for centuries, until its sudden and complete disappearance. How do vast lakes vanish without a trace? How do entire worlds and cultures disappear — and what remains in their place? Could there be a connection between the Jewish catastrophe in Eastern Europe and the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia during Stalinist repressions? Can one person’s forgetting reach several generations deep? Are we connected by the signs and scars of a wounded memory? Can love and patience allow us to touch another person’s consciousness?
