Films by Rainer Komers

Germany 2022, 97 min
by Rainer Komers

The follow-up film to “Barstow, California” takes us to the mountains of Miyama, a remote forest and tourist area north of Kyoto. Uwe Walter, a shakuhachi player from Germany, lives there with his wife Mitsuyo for 30 years. Together with the villagers he prepares the annual Gion Festival. On the eve of the festival, the village representatives tell him that his self-built studio is to be demolished. This brings back memories for him of earlier times and his first steps as a Nō actor.In the manner of a fresco, the film interweaves rural depictions of everyday life with the story of its German protagonist. In the village community with its togetherness of generations, Uwe shares life with his neighbours, with farmers, hunters, woodsmen, poultry farmers and anglers, tills his kitchen garden, and like other tradition-conscious villagers, he also grows his rice. The film shows them in a harsh mountain landscape between the rainy season and the first snow.

2022, 113 min
by Peter Nestler

The film is about the German Sinti and Roma’s different forms of resistance spanning eight decades. It’s about revolt against injustice and about insistence on dignity and justice. A story of courage and resolve of individuals who desperately defended themselves. And the story of suffering of a minority caught between trauma and self-assertion: an ongoing unprecedented injustice throughout all of the post-war years to this very day. It is based around Romani Rose, his family and fellow campaigners. Thirteen close relatives of the Rose family were murdered in concentration camps. Romani Rose’s father Oskar went into hiding during the Nazi years and was wanted by the Gestapo. The film is about his courageous actions. And about his attempt in April 1943 to beg Munich’s Cardinal Faulhaber to protect the persecuted, and how he manged to free his brother from the concentration camp in Neckarelz. For Roma and Sinti who survived the genocide, discrimination, poverty and authorities’ chicanery were part of everyday life. The Porajmos, the genocide against this minority group, was only officially recognized in 1982. The film describes their long journey away from their lack of rights and discrimination and into a civil rights movement. Their untiring commitment is testimony to their moral courage and public spirit, their decisive advocacy of cooperation between various cultures and their ground-breaking vision of democracy. Is there anything more important in times of increasing marginalization and racist violence?

Germany 2018, 76 min
by Rainer Komers

‘Barstow, California’ is the third film in the trilogy ‘The American West’ (the other two films are: ‘Nome Road System’ and ‘Milltown, Montana’) about places in the relatively sparsely populated areas of the American West. It is an artistic documentary recording life & landscape in the California southwestern desert. The trilogy’s style of ‘landscape listening’ (ambient audio only) will be altered somewhat with Barstow to add the voice of Stanley ‘Spoon’ Jackson (an internationally-acclaimed, Barstow-born prisoner/poet) to the soundtrack reading passages from his autobiography dealing with his youth & life in the area.

Germany 2017, 30 min
by Rainer Komers

A whistling fence, tamed landscape: people, couples, animals, plants, machines, moving and waiting. Water, fire, earth, wind, the stars. A white dog bites hard straw, the white machine eats soft chalk. Pilots coming and going, a screaming roller coaster, fugue by Bach, fingers writing into the water: "We are alone." ‘Kursmeldungen – Position Reports’ is an essayistic journey through close-to-nature coastlines and places, which are shaped both by closeness to the earth and cosmopolitism – and their response to a world, moved by antagonistic tempos.

Germany 2012, 5 min
by Rainer Komers

Trees seaming the river, mobile homes, an industrial zone surrounded by chemical plants and power stations; in their midst, a memorial for the dead soldiers of the World Wars. The film ends with Ulrike Almut Sandig’s poem [meine heimat] about foreignness, loss and destruction.

Germany 2012, 78 min
by Kay Ilfrich, Fredo Wulf

Nowhere in the world produce the same two factories, Vossloh and Voith, successfully modern diesel locomotives as in Kiel. Why is that has to do with political ideas, and people who put them into reality. As in the eighties in the metalworking industry thousands of jobs were destroyed, established made up of workers and engineers from the IG Metall in Kiel MaK Maschinenbau company the Working group Alternative production. Based on these initial political and environmental activists, the film told through eyewitness interviews, archival footage and documentary observations of the extraordinary development of Lokbaus in Kiel continued of the eighties until today.

Germany 2010, 5 min
by Rainer Komers

A former waste-water canal running through a former mining area is transformed into a natural river - a piece of 'naturalized' industrial history: "Who would've thought that we'd move so quickly to a postindustrial world dominated by virtual products and cyber-realities? A world with no use for the physical objects of the recent past, and no place for the makers and consumers of formerly quaint and useful materials. We now live in an age where we must sentimentalize our trash in order to save ourselves from annihilation by way of abstraction." (Mark Elijah Rosenberg, New York)

Germany 2009, 30 min
by Rainer Komers

Meticulously composed images, impressive collages of sound, no dialogue: „Milltown, Montana“ is an elegiac excursion across a magnificent landscape deeply scarred by man. Applying the same majestic imagery as in his prize-winning films, „Kobe“ and „Nome Road System“, Rainer Komers documents what was once the largest mining region in the United States, now contaminated by toxic substances and heavy metals, and seemingly trapped in a post- industrial phase of standstill.