“There once was a man./This man came into the European war./Germany captured this man./He wishes to return to India./If God has mercy, he will make peace soon./This man will go away from here.”
Mall Singh’s crackling words are heard as he spoke into the phonographic funnel on December 11, 1916, near Berlin. 90 years later, Singh is a number on an old Shellac record in an archive – one amongst hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of the First World War. The recordings were produced as the result of a unique alliance between the military, the scientific community, and the entertainment industry. In THE HALFMOON FILES, Scheffner follows the traces of these voices to the origin of their recording. As in a memory game, he uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. His protagonists’ words intersect along the concentric spirals the story follows. Those who pressed the record button on the phonographs, on photo and film cameras, were the ones to write the official history.
Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from this story. Their spirits and ghostly appearances pursue the filmmaker on his path, urging him to return their voices to their homelands. Yet the story of these ghosts escapes the control of the narrator. And the ghosts do not disperse.

“Like the late author W.G. Sebald, Scheffner describes some of the century’s most tumultuous and tragic events not with broad strokes but with allusiveness and subtlety, layered moments of emerging revelation.” –Peter Culley, VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL