D’Est is a moving documentary shot over a summer and a winter in Germany, Poland, and Russia on the eve of the unification of Western Europe. Envisioned as a "grand journey" across Eastern Europe, Akerman’s film was to include “everything that moves me: Faces, streets, cars going by and buses, train stations and plains, rivers and oceans, streams and brooks, trees and forests. Fields and factories and yet more faces. Food, interiors, doors, windows, meals being prepared. Women and men, young and old, people passing by or at rest, seated or standing, even lying down. Days and nights, wind and rain, snow and springtime." She was particularly interested in capturing the disintegration of the former Soviet bloc and became deeply engrossed in the pervasiveness of despair and immobility. While the arc of her journey is visible in the completed work, much of D’Est focuses on haunting images of a snowclad Moscow, frozen in history but poised for precipitous change.