Germany, 1945. Life goes on in the partly French, partly US-American occupied Allgäu. People eg. want to watch films, now as before, and the small town cinema where Otto Brettschneider works as a projectionist is only too happy to oblige. The landscape of the generally rather rural Allgäu (as well as other picturesque part of Germany and Austria) will soon be the key for a new genre destined to take local box offices by storm: the Heimatfilm. In this, freshly denazified director Helmut Hartmeyer finds his latest calling – Unterhaltung as usual. His old friend and collaborator, cameraman Franz Bauer, though, can’t simply forget and continue, can’t pretend his work had nothing to do with the horrors Nazi Germany had unleashed unto the world; he wants to work on films that address these years, just that nobody wants to make them. Time goes on, cinema loses critical ground against television, film theatres start to close – while on TV, the likes of Hartmeyer can still hold forth…
A little known masterpiece, part comedy part something bleaker, that finds the whole ideological mess that was the Young Federal Republic of Germany in the nutshell of cinema, it’s making as well as its presentation!
Olaf Möller