On behalf of the US-based prestigious Templeton Foundation, the Conference of European Churches (CEC), Geneva – together with the International Interchurch Film Organisation INTERFILM – presents since 1997 annually the John Templeton Film Award of the Year to an European film. The film, chosen by an Ecumenical Jury of three members, will have already received a festival award from a church jury (by an Interfilm or an Ecumenical Jury) or the nomination as “film of the month” by the Jury of the Protestant Film Work in Germany or the Protestant and Catholic Filmcommissioners in Switzerland. The award includes a sum of money (since 2002 CHFr. 10’000) and an inscribed certificate of recognition.

Sermon

held on the occasion of the awarding of the Templeton Film Award 2003 to
THE RETURN by Andrey Zvyagnitsev
Service on the 8th February, 2004, 6 pm
St Matthew's Church, Berlin
by Hans Werner Dannowski

5 Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the
prophet before the coming of the great and
terrible day of the LORD. 6 He will restore
the hearts of the fathers to their children and
the hearts of the children to their fathers, so
that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.

 Maleachi 4, 5+6

Dear congregation! A father returns. All of a sudden, out of the blue. He has been away for ten years – nobody knows where. Maybe he was in prison, some dubious deals and secret phone calls hint at this possibility. Maybe he was at war, in Chechenya or somewhere else. He is a stranger to both of his sons. With difficulty do they recognize similarities on old photographs. On them, the little one is lifted into the air by his father, the older one sitting next to them, the mother laughing. Obviously, those were happy times. But now, everything is different.

 Yes, fathers and sons. With great vividness, the film “The Return” points to a topic that is often and easily dismissed as irrelevant. The importance that mothers have with regard to their children’s life and their happiness or unhappiness, is obvious. They have been pregnant with them, have given birth to them in pain, have nourished, cared for and looked after them. Andrey and Ivan have lived by their mother’s and their grandmother’s, the babushka’s, love up till now. But the fathers…? Yet, we all have had a father, whatever the relationship we had with him or he had with us. You could think about your own fathers for a moment…

 I think that the neglect of this topic is probably due to the fact that men as fathers have often been in the background. Only recently, there seems to have been a change in this development. Immediately after having seen the film, I got a book from my shelves – a book written 50 years ago by one of my theological professors in Hamburg. It bears the title “The World Without Fathers”. It deals with the crisis of fatherly authority in all areas of life: family, school, state, church. “The Age of the Son”, which we live in today, is declared. As if Hans-Rudolf Müller-Schwefe had just now seen the film “The Return”.

 It might just as well be possible, dear congregation, that this father who tries to find his place in his sons’ lives  with rigorous methods is meant to represent Russia itself. Indeed, Russia’s role that it plays in relation to its citizens and ethnic groups who have been released into a greater freedom is not easily to be defined and found. The film suggestively draws us into nearly mythical rooms and spaces: the Lagoda Lake with its sudden storms, the rain that comes like the Flood, the dark clouds and the endless forests. All the great and mysterious father and son stories of humanity have came up in my mind while watching the film: from Oedipus and his father who Oedipus kills without recognizing him, to the returning Ulysses and his Telemach. Yes, maybe even the most all-embracing father-child relation is hinted at – a relation that we are trying to put into words with “Our Lord’s Prayer”. Father thou art in heaven. The Father who is so often and for such a long time absent, too, that we sometimes do not even miss him anymore. It is certainly no coincidence that the film is divided into the seven days of the creation of the world. Of course, it is the division made by the Christian tradition that begins with a Sunday, the day of resurrection, and ends with a Saturday, the day when Christ was borne to his grave. And it is certainly no coincidence either that the iconographic representations of the sleeping and the dead father copy Renaissance representations of the dead Christ, such as by Andrea Mantegna.

 Andrey Zvyagintsev’s wisdom and artistic force let him only hint at all these possible references and he leaves them to his spectator’s attention and capacity of interpretation. He just tells a story about the return of a father to his two sons – a story that deals with the essential experiences of our existence in our world. It is a life experience that is so elementary – the experience that God will send a prophet before the arrival of the Messiah, a prophet who will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. So it is said in the passage of the bible that I have added to the film. Only when the fathers and the children open themselves completely to one another, God’s kingdom has truly come.

 But now I have to tell the story a little further for those who have not seen the film “The Return”. Suddenly a father, who has been absent for a long time, reappears, takes his sons on a trip that is supposed to be short, but lasts longer and longer and turns into being a survival training of their relationships with each other. The returned tries to win back his place in the lives of the two sons. There only is something to eat when he wants it. They go to an island where he buried something. The sons have to be back from fishing at times that he sets. The boys oppose the fatherly orders with their own structures – when it comes to a clash, punishments are there: Ivan who is abandoned on the road in the pouring rain, Andrey who gets slapped on the face. The climax of the film is quickly reached. The sudden eruption of hate is like a storm. First with Ivan who has kept his distance to the father right from the start. Then with Andrey, then with the father, too. And I can still see the scene before my eyes: Ivan attacks his father with a knife when the latter stands above Andrey, axe in hand – like Abraham and Isaac before. Maybe also wishing that an angel might come between the two. “I could love you if you were different”, Ivan screams at his father. “But I hate you.”

  Yes, this sudden eruption of hate, anger and need to destroy. And I suddenly understood when watching “The Return”: Hate does also have a constructive moment to it. Hate wants to create the spiritual precondition for love, and occasionally it succeeds. Now we – especially in the Christian churches – have judged hate and put it under an absolute ban and only succeeded in letting hate unconsciously poison our relationships. Love and destructiveness will always be related with each other and hate often sets free energies that love needs to really be completely with oneself and completely with the other. Hate discovers the sudden strangeness of the other that threatens me. At first, you get furious, you could blindly destroy everything. And then suddenly – not always, of course – you know that the other, the strangeness belongs to you. That you can love it. Just like father and sons – with knife drawn and axe risen – suddenly know that they belong to each other. That they essentially love each other. The little one runs away, wants to throw himself off the lighthouse. The father calls after him: “Son”, he calls, “Son, do not do it!” He who dies is not the boy. It is the father.

 The aim, the inner sense of our hate is – love. I think that, maybe, our love is so weak because our hate is so broken. If– according to Jesus’ words – we as his successors could also hate the brother – the brother, as I understand it, who consciously or unconsciously enslaves and destroys the other with his egoism and his fantasies of omnipotence. If we could scream at his or her face: “I could love you if you were different” – then we would probably love more beauty and goodness in ourselves and in others than we imagine. If it is true that love is as strong as death, then it also needs an energy that also sometimes gets blind with fury before it embraces the other.

 Then the two brothers return from the island with the dead father in the boat. Before the motor starts, the boat glides noiselessly on a silvery stream as if it went directly to a wonderful country. The two boys sit silently in the boat, later, onshore, they hold wake. There is not much to say. The metamorphosis from indifference over hate to love is not always easily to be had. Out of our Christian faith we know exactly that reconciliation demands sacrifices. Sometimes you only know when it is too late that the one who died for it was the saving protection that we had in life. But all the same: This knowledge makes its way to the two sons just as forcefully as the hate before. When the boat with the dead father comes off the shore and slowly sinks, Andrey and Ivan go after it into the deep water. Especially Ivan cannot stop calling out the word that he could not say before: Dad! he calls after him, Dad!

 To live with an absent father will be Andrey’s and Ivan’s fate. We all do not stay children forever. We grow up, have to live without fathers and mothers. What we keep are images and memories – that is a lot. But protection, the certainty of taking a right way, and confidence will only be there when the wounds of the unloved child have healed. This goes for the relationship of sons and daughters with their earthly mothers and fathers who will no longer be there one day. But who will accompany us with what they have given us and what we have given them till the end of our lives. This similarly goes for our relationship with the foundation of all existence that we imagine as a personal vis-à-vis and call “our Father in heaven”. The wound of an unwanted, unloved, and senseless life destroys every life around. Belief in the “ontological priority of existence over the nothing” – as Dorothee Sölle said. Belief in God, his creation, his love, and his justice and live towards it – that is what it is all about. Pass on the certainty that this father whose absence we often do not notice for a long time and whose presence we then again ardently beg for is like a good mother.

 With his film “The Return”, Andrey Zvyagintsev has given us a wonderful parable for a life that is greatly filled with crisis, but finally succeeds. Thus, in my opinion, this film – in its unity of artistic creation and exploration as regards content – is awarded with the Templeton Film Award 2003 with high justifiability. What the prophet says about Judgement Day and the fulfillment of life and all times is anticipated and practised in a knowing game of life. That one will come to restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. If this happens, on a greater scale, then God’s kingdom will truly have come.