Home from Home [Die andere Heimat – Chronik einer Sehnsucht] ***** (2013, Jan Dieter Schneider, Antonia Bill) – Movie Review

Co-writer/director Edgar Reitz‘s overwhelming world cinema masterpiece makes a devastating emotional and intellectual impact. Astoundingly you can look in vain for international movie awards for it, though it was appreciated in Germany.

Reitz shoots his follow-up to his classic TV trilogy Heimat for cinemas, and it is again set in the fictional village Schabbach in the Hunsrück region of Rhineland-Palatinate. Unfolding in the 1830s, it forms a prequel to Heimat.

Jan Dieter Schneider has his first credit as Jakob Simon, the bookish son of a troubled farming family, who dreams of emigrating for a better life in Brazil, away from the appalling hardships of toil, disease, famine and early death in snowy Prussia. He’s the main character and narrator and chronicler of the story, which focuses partly on him and his loving mother (Marita Breuer) and hard, brutish father (Rüdiger Kriese), and partly on him and his older brother Gustav (Maximilian Scheidt) and the girl (Antonia Bill) in between them.

Filmed in black and white like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, with some spot colour as in Schindler’s List, it looks glorious in many awesome painterly images, but it also puts you in there in spirit in the time and place, suffering along with the villagers. The characters gradually come alive and take hold like real people do. It take a while to get to know the characters but they get right into you and, almost despite yourself, you get completely involved in their fates.

It’s a perfect-looking, masterly re-creation of a long-vanished world, with astonishing production designs. And, though visually stunning throughout and can be simply admired for its astounding images, it also gradually builds to deliver its devastating emotional and intellectual impact. It is, in short a true art work.

Home from Home could be the stuff of period soap opera, a heritage BBC Film perhaps, but instead it’s art and poetry. Reitz makes his meditation on life, love, separation and death four hours of world cinema bliss.

There are three TV series – Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (TV mini-series, 11 episodes) in 1984, Heimat II: A Chronicle of a Generation (TV mini-series, 13 episodes) in 1993 and Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (TV mini-series, 6 episodes) in 2006. Reitz was born on November 1 1932.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com