Who is Lena? What is she up to? Does she even know her mission? Setting out from an East Berlin neighborhood that is home to former dignitaries, she goes about passing out small, innocent-seeming gifts from Budapest to Transylvania to Kiev. She crosses the Danube delta, the Black Sea, Anatolia, and the Aleppo bazaar. Each time, she crosses borders incognito, claiming to have nothing to declare. A journey at once timeless and inextricable from the great issues of our age, “Lena” combines the intimacy dear to André Juillard and Pierre Christin’s predilection for vast geopolitical canvases.
