Films by Edgar Reitz

Germany 2024, 89 min
by Jörg Adolph, Edgar Reitz

In 1968, a classroom in a girls’ high school in Munich is transformed into a film studio under the direction of the young Edgar Reitz. The film lesson begins: the first documented attempt in cinema history to teach film aesthetics as a stand-alone subject. In 2023, Edgar Reitz, now world-famous as the director of the film epic Heimat, is approached by an elderly woman who identifies herself as one of his pupils from 1968. The two arrange a class reunion. Compiled from a documentary made about the project at the time, the Super 8 films shot by the pupils and the filmed reunion in 2023, a kind of long exposure of the last 55 years of film history is created. Are the personalities of the pupils already evident in the exercise films? And what do the women have to say now about contemporary film culture? Filmstunde_23 is a declaration of love for filmmaking.[74 BERLINALE]

Germany 2019, 84 min
by Anna Hepp

The film is a non-commercial arthouse documentary film about famous 86-year-old German filmmaker Edgar Reitz. Anna Hepp, the young filmmaker of this documentary, meets with Reitz in one of Germany‘s most famous cinemas: the Lichtburg in Essen. This film‘s main focus is a continuous dialogue between these two people from two different generations and genders: young and old – female and male. Anna Hepp asks the film expert Edgar Reitz about if and how cinema might be fading away from Germany’s media culture. They talk about the difficulties of filmmaking and the struggle to survive in this business, then and now. The bottom line of the film is: just as at some point you have to say good-bye to everything in life, friends, family, loved ones, you might also have to say good-bye to cinema culture. Filmmaking is an attempt to preserve memories forever. The film is a declaration of Love for Cinema and Love for Filmmaking. (Venice IFF)