Films by Rainer Komers

2025, 17 min
by Rainer Komers

„Kamogawa“ is a composition of scenes of peaceful life along an autumnal river, orchestrated by the sounds of rattling trains, traditional musical instruments and looms, and the fragile voice of an elderly opera singer. It's a place where time seems to have stood still, yet subtly conveys a sense of unease. The film concludes with a train ride through modern Kyoto and a Rückenfigur by a large lake.

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 manne

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 campaigne

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, Ba

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 the

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 tol

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 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 ou

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.