Making of Heimat

This making-of film about Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision, the last part of Edgar Reitz’s monumental Heimat series, starts with the casting. Actors and actresses with a slim build and bad teeth have an advantage, as the inhabitants of the Hunsrück region around 1840 experienced great famine and harsh conditions. “None of us would have survived the winter back then,” Reitz tells the actors, while urging them to unlearn the manners they have learned for community theater. Directors Jörg Adolph and Anja Pohl also stick to Reitz’s advice: “Don’t do an ordinary making-of, but make a film that shows how films are made.” So we watch as Reitz clashes with residents of the village of Gehlweiler – where the village of Schabbach will be created for the film – on the closing of their access road. Then there is suddenly no budget left to buy potatoes for a food scene, and perfectionist Reitz has to justify his choice of a modest role for the music to the composer. Fifty years after the drafting of the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which German filmmakers expressed their desire to free themselves from the conventions of the film industry, 80-year-old Reitz remains faithful to the ideals of New German Cinema: “Any moment in life could be the opening scene of a movie; you just have to take it seriously enough.” (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)