"Heimat, dopo il Muro
e fino al Millennio"
Pesaro, Edgar Reitz parla della terza serie del suo kolossal

ALBERTO FARASSINO

Edgar Reitz, "Herr Heimat", is at the Pesaro Festival of the New Cinema in order to participate to a round table on the cinema of the sixties and to introduce its first feature film, Mahlzeiten, of 1966. But by now its opus magnum absorbs all his thoughts, so that he is led to say "Heimat is for me the name of all what I can make: also my films before Heimat have become Heimat". So, we speak about Heimat 3, the new series that at a distance of a decade (the first one came out in 1984, the second one in 1992) should shortly enter into production " In the last years I have dedicated all my energies to try to convince the German TV that producing the movie would not have been too much shameful -says the director with bitter irony. I have many offering of participation from other countries and also two or three from Italy but, until the German TV, that must cover half of the budget, does not decide, the others must wait. Now only the highest level of the TV management must approve it, and in the February of next year shooting might start". In the meantime, he has not been passive: the script is written and the cast is chosen in good part.
How many episodes will be there? " Six or perhaps seven, because the idea of Heimat 3 is that every episode happens in a certain day of the week. But during period of ten years, which goes from the fall of the Berlin wall, which happened on Thursday, to the last day of the century. And between these two days, other meaningful days, as the one in which Germany gained the Football World Cup, which was on Friday. The protagonists are in part those of the previous series and in part new ones. But Hermann is still there, the young musician who has turned into the director of Berlin Philharmonic. An evening going out after his concert, he sees a huge crowd in the roads, it is the East Berliners who invade the city. And between them he discovers Clarissa, the girl with whom he had a love story as a student. So, a new story begins ". Heimat 2 ended with Hermann who returns to its village... " and also this time he will return there, but he will find that everything is changed. His siblings have become rich, taking advantage from the re-unification, like the other generations had taken advantage from the war. But there are also things that are not changed, like its house, empty but not destroyed". But does Heimat still exist in the time of globalisation? " Heimat is not the global village, a village without coffee houses and taverns. Neither can Europe be the global village. The fall of the Wall was the last time in which Germans could expect happiness from the inside of their own nation. Now, this possibility does not exist any more. But Heimat always remains the place in which we expect something. And in any case there is something truly international, what lead Japanese or New Zealander to identify themselves with the characters of a German village, and it is the language of the film. The cinema is a multicultural eye, the total eye of the human being "