Films by Juliane Henrich

Germany 2021, 80 min
by Juliane Henrich

The film Land Before Time takes the director's family history as a starting point to explore the concepts of home and historiography in the politically highly charged landscape of Silesia. The protagonist embarks on a trip to the Polish village of Krasiejów as the director's alter ego. We follow her through the summer days with surreal encounters where the borders of fiction and documentary are blurred. She meets people of German and Polish origin who had to leave their homes at the end of the war, she stumbles upon monuments, and observes paleontologists, searching for an ancient being. The ground as a metaphor for belonging seems to speak out of everything she sees and dinosaurs start to populate the screen, questioning the certainty of descendance.

Germany 2014, 6 min
by Juliane Henrich

Is it possible to shift a place on the map? Old villages are razed, that is, cleared away, to make room for the opencast mine Garzweiler II. They are built up again in other locations, and the inhabitants are resettled there. The new houses look nothing like the old ones, but the street names remain the same – only the word “new” is added. In slow tracking shots through the old villages and the new settlements, the film interweaves views of something that might be “Heimat.” Is it possible to shift a place on the map? In slow pans through old villages and new settlements in the Rheinisches Braunkohlrevier, the film interweaves views of something that might be “Heimat”.