“Compelling, moving and thought-provoking… an intellectually-stimulating crowd-pleaser.” - Hollywood Reporter

Swetlana Geier has spent sixty years of her life translating great Russian literature into German, including Dostoyevsky's five major novels - his ‘elephants' as she describes them. For Geier, translation is a work of creativity, a craft that rests on finding words that resonate from one culture to another.

A sleeper hit at the Vienna and Rotterdam film festivals, The Woman with the 5 Elephants follows the charismatic Geier as she returns to the Ukraine for the first time since the war, her musings on translation giving way to musings on her own extraordinary life lived under both Stalinist persecution and Nazi occupation.