Bert Rebhandl, Areas of Refuge, Cinema in the diaspora of Documenta11, Springer 3/02

[...] Ulrike Ottinger's six-and-a-half-hour-long »Southeast Passage« (»South-East Passage«), a journey from Berlin to the Black Sea through an eastern European landscape that will not even be included in the next EU expansion towards the east, is to be seen before an entire work that combines experimental (»Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia«) and orthodox (»Taiga«) ethnographic strategies. Ottinger has frequently explored the Far East. In »Southeast Passage,« she takes a closer look at the Byzantine sphere of influence and a culture that is characterized by the interactions between Moslem and (eastern) Christian influences as well as those of the Jewish communities. Documenta helped in the production of this film, which was shown in the Binding Brewery in a screening room next to Louise Bourgeois. Ottinger crosses the national borders in the Balkans by restoring a cultural space that even the 20th-century regime was not able to destroy completely. The sonorous voice of an English-speaking narrator supplements the pictures, mostly street scenes from Wroclaw or Odessa and various literary and philosophical material. The »Southeast Passage« can be justifiably compared with an ethnographic expedition. By doing without original sound (which was essential in »Taiga,« in the sense of a natural force), a »third space« of objectivity is opened up from which the observed and the observer almost disappear.[...]