Films by Urs Hauck

Germany 2019, 98 min
by Grit Lemke

"My swing is in an enchanted garden, behind the railway embankment. Up in the air, on my swing, I see the trains, squeaking past day and night shedding black dust. They come out of the huge holes that gape between our villages. As a child, I think the whole world looks like this: Holes, with villages between, my swing in the middle. And the trains. They're coal trains." Gerhard Gundermann (1955–1998), singer-songwriter, poet and excavator operator in the Lusatian brown coal mines. In this region, global problems are condensed on a local level as if by a burning glass – from structural change to climate crisis. Mostly unpublished archive material and Gundermann’s songs enter into a dialogue with observations and conversations in his 'district', accompanied by the voice-over of the director, who is no less deeply rooted in the coal mining district. Home and its destruction through strip mining, utopian ideas and the question of individual responsibility run through the songs, as do their consequences for gainful employment and the environment at the end of the industrial age. And they are more topical than ever today: "Where my swing stood, then your digger, is now a lake." (DOK Leipzig, Frederik Lang)

Germany 2018, 135 min
by Volker Koepp

With SEESTÜCK, Volker Koepp concludes a series of documentaries that he began in 2010 with BERLIN-STETTIN. In this film, the director mixed autobiographical references with his description of East German film and living spaces for the first time. IN SARMATIA, 2013 he expanded the view of the region east of the Weichsel (Vistula) and between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. With LANDSTÜCK, 2016, Volker Koepp returned to the Uckermark in the north of Berlin. SEESTÜCK - a film about the Baltic Sea, about life by the sea and with the sea - concludes the series. As in the films before, the arcs of history are reflected here in the private lives of the present. The following also applies to the small Baltic Sea: landscape is world view.