Subtitles:

English, none

Extras:

The most sublime case of monomania in European cinema, director Edgar Reitz has dedicated much of his life to recreating modern German history on screen. Heimat, his 1984 TV series, ran for more than 15 hours, tracing the fortunes of a family from its rural Prussian roots, starting in 1919; its title, meaning homeland, reclaimed the term from the disreputable connotations it had acquired in the Nazi era. Reitz later made a second tranche covering the 1960s in detail, then a third series which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you include the female-focused “annexe”, Heimat Fragments, that makes 54 hours – now rounded up to 58 with the addition of Home From Home, Reitz’s prequel to the series.

This new chapter focuses primarily on a single character, Jakob, a 19th-century forebear of the Simon clan from Reitz’s fictional village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück region. The Hunsrück of the 1840s is beset by poverty and profound social injustice, although French-inspired ideas of revolution are in the air. It’s also a time of widespread migration to Brazil – the “andere Heimat”, or other homeland, of the German title. Jakob Simon is a poor blacksmith’s son but an enthused autodidact and scholar of South American languages.

German auteur filmmaker Edgar Reitz returns to the fictitious German village of Schabbach with Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision – a staggering, near four-hour epic that acts as a prequel to the other 32 Heimat films that have consistently dribbled onto German television over the past few decades. The film series homefromhome2spans almost a century, and adopts the view of a German family occupying the Rhineland using crisp black and white imagery.

Naturally, those who are more intimate with Reitz’s mega series will find more to love about this expansive prequel than an unsuspecting viewer who stumbles into its screening by chance. While taking at least a peek at some of the Heimat movies is certainly recommended before sitting down to watch Home from Home, there is enough about the film to engage the more patient viewer, including some impressive performances, gorgeous cinematography, and extraordinary agricultural imagery in black in white with occasional pinches of colour.

Gary Tooze

May 26th, 2015