Heimat, the story of a Century
Heimat and Heimat 2, a great European project with rare sophistication and ambitions on which Edgar Reitz has been working for twenty-five years, has become a reference in the history of cinema and television. This series of episodes, a 50 hours travel through the 20th Century in Germany recounting the daily life of an ordinary town, Shabbach, has just been added a third part, Heimat 3 : The Story of a Century. It consists of 6 feuture films on the fall of the Berlin wall and its consequences up to now, still seen through Shabbach and its inhabitants. Heimat 3, screened for a premiere in Venice, will be officially released in Italy by Mikado, on the 4th of March. The six episodes, for the first time dubbed in Italian, will be released in fifteen copies one by one every fortnight.
This work, which took seven years and cost 12 million euros, has already been sold, besides Italy, to the Netherlands, Great-Britain, Scandinavia, the United-States, and Australia.
‘I had to fight to get the money,’ says the director. ‘For the first two parts of Heimat , TV funds and pre-sales were enough, but this third part was supported for 40% by the European Union and other public partners.’ For Reitz, German televisions totally control cinema funds : ‘In Germany, the institutions which support cinema are in fact directed by powerful TV guys with narrow ambitions who are not interested in exporting.’
(Translated from Italian)
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