Germans from Russia Documentary Videos
At Home in Russia, At Home on the Prairie
What causes a region—a place—to imprint itself upon the people who are born and live there? What is the connection between landscape and memory? What is forgotten and what is remembered? Prairie Public's newest documentary in the Germans From Russia series shows how a territory can endure in the minds of the descendants of those inhabitants after years, even after generations, have passed.
Childhood Memories: Germans from Russia
Germans from Russia children growing up in rural South Dakota during the Great Depression were no strangers to hard work. When that one-room school house bell rang in the fall, it was like a vacation from the daily grind of farming. They knew that education was their ticket to a better life.
The Germans from Russia: Children of the Steppe, Children of the Prairie
Germans From Russia: Children of the Steppe, Children of the Prairie was the story of the agricultural pioneers whose quest for land and peace led them across several continents and shaped them into a distinctive and enduring ethnic group. This documentary was a finalist in the U Siebe International Film Festival, the only American documentary to be invited to participate in the juried competition. It also received a platinum Best of Show Telly Award, and was awarded a Bronze Plaque Award at the Columbus Film and Television Festival.
Gutes Essen: Good Eating in German-Russian Country
Gutes Essen: Good Eating in German-Russian Country is Prairie Public's newest documentary that celebrates the food culture of the Germans from Russia who emigrated to south central North Dakota beginning in the 1880s. Visit the kitchens of ten local North Dakota cooks who make strudels, sauerkraut, kartoffel-kurbis strumbas, fleischkuechla, borscht, rahmnoodla, pickled beets, stirrum, knoephla soup, and kuchen. Spend a morning at the historic Model Bakery in Linton where kuchen is hand crafters, and tour Grandma's kuchen, Ashley North Dakota's small town business. Learn the tricks of making sausage at Schmitt Locker in Napoleon and the Supervalu in Zeeland. Explore the church fair and supper in Strasburg and the 91st Sauerkraut Days in Wishek. The food is great, but the stories are even better.
Homesteading
Blends interviews with historians, the stories told by descendants of homesteaders, and dramatic readings from pioneer diaries & letters to paint a picture of the people who struggled with daily life enduring hardships & successes they celebrated.
Prairie Crosses, Prairie Voices
Iron Crosses stand as sentinels on the prairie landscape, framed by huge expanses of grass and sky. Though they stand silent, behind each one is a story. Prairie Crosses, Prairie Voices evokes these stories, memories of the Germans from Russia, a frugal and tenacious people whose blacksmiths used wagon-wheel rims and scrap metal to fashion markers for the graves of the dead. Prairie Crosses, Prairie Voices follows the traditional iron art form that crossed continents and oceans and survived famine and war, to be reborn on the Great Plains in Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Recipes from Grandma's Kitchen Volume I and II
Recipes from Grandma’s Kitchen Volume I documents the resourcefulness of the Germans from Russia in the preparation of food for large families by showing traditional cooks presenting family-pleasing recipes. Traditional foods, savory recipes, and folk memories are important in the history and culture of the Germans from Russia community. "Recipes from Grandma's Kitchen" provides step-by-step detailed cooking and ingredients. There are vignettes of culinary memories that feed the soul and warm the heart.
We'll Meet Again in Heaven
This thirty minute documentary is a searing chronicle of a forgotten genocide and a lost people, whose "... misery screams to the heavens." The lost people are the ethnic German minority living in Soviet Ukraine, who wrote their American relatives about the starvation, forced labor, and execution that were almost daily fare in Soviet Ukraine during this period, 1928-1938.
Women Behind the Plow
“Women Behind the Plow” shares insights of 19 women ranging in age from 15 to 92 on what it's like to be a woman involved in agriculture. Stories range from growing up on a farm during the great depression of the 1930s to farming with todays modern technology. The women express themselves with great candor and share a common love of the land.
Page last updated 5 March 2022