Edgar Reitz is shooting a new documentary in Munich – Munich

Edgar Reitz turned 90 a few months ago, his last film was ten years ago. But now the Munich auteur filmmaker and creator of the “Heimat” cycle is working on a new project again: the full-length documentary with the working title “Filmstunden 23” was shot in April, and Reitz is currently sitting with his team in the editing room, viewing and assembles the film and image material. This film project is produced by the big winner of this year’s German Film Prize, Ingo Fliess (“The Teacher’s Room”). It should be completed by autumn; When and where it will celebrate its premiere is not yet certain.

In the late summer of 2013, Reitz’ visually stunning four-hour epic “The Other Home – Chronicle of a Longing” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and later it won several German and Bavarian film prizes. An artistic triumph for the filmmaker, who was born in the Hunsrück and has lived in Munich since his student days, the conclusion of his main work spanning many decades. In the years that followed, Edgar Reitz mainly took care of securing these films. Together with his son Christian Reitz, he worked on the digital restoration of the “Heimat” films – which was a mammoth task, after all, they have a total length of more than 50 hours.

The filmmaker came to his new project by chance: During a visit to the theater, an elderly lady who identified herself as a former student approached him. Because Edgar Reitz has not only been making films for more than sixty years, he also worked as a teacher. In 1963, together with Alexander Kluge, he founded the institute for film design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, where he also taught for several years, giving courses in direction and camera. In 1968 he taught a course at the Luisengymnasium in Munich that dealt with the history and aesthetics of film art. His students were twenty-six thirteen-year-old girls. In the practical part of the lesson, each of the students should design, shoot and edit their own Super 8 short film.

The elderly lady whom Reitz had approached in the theater told him that contact with her classmates had never been broken. They would still meet every year to talk about their shared passion for film and cinema. For a cineaste and former teacher, that must sound like a dream, for education and cultural politicians too: For many years there have been repeated efforts to establish film education as a fixed school subject. Which would make perfect sense in view of the ever-increasing flood of images: children today consume films, series, YouTube or Tiktok videos for hours, but have never learned to reflect on what they see. One could even argue that they are cinematic illiterate.

After meeting his former student, Edgar Reitz went on a search: in archives he found the Super 8 films that had been shot 55 years ago and remained intact, he had them digitized and showed them at a class reunion in Munich in April. Reitz’ new film will also tell about this, about young girls’ first attempts at cinematic expression, the reunion with the teacher from back then and the awakening of a lifelong love of cinema.

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