Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films

of Epstein – Mario Adorf. ”And he was involved very early
Bruno Ganz, Mario Adorf, Otto Tausig (photo © MTM)
of Epstein - Mario Adorf. ”And he was involved very early
on, also contributing to the development of the screenplay“,
Bareiß explains, ”and only then did we cast the other parts for
our dream cast“.
”The forum for this film is not limited to Germany”, Bareiß
continues, “it is a film which has countries abroad in its sights, and
I think that if there is a strong interest in the film abroad, this will
have an effect on its reception back in Germany“.
Shooting on the DM 7.6 million project began in Berlin in mid-
February and continued in Vienna during March, followed by
a second shoot in Berlin from mid-May. Delivery of the film is
scheduled for August 2001.
Wildenranna –
Ein Heimatfilm
Original Title Wildenranna – Ein Heimatfilm (working title)
Type of Project Documentary Genre Direct Cinema,
Ethnographic Film Production Company Tangram Christian
Bauer Filmproduktion, Munich, for Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich
With backing from FilmFernsehFonds Bayern Producer
Christian Bauer Director Alice Agneskirchner Screenplay
Alice Agneskirchner (Documentary Treatment) Directors of
Photography Johannes Straub, Rainer Hartmann Editor
Julia Furch Format Digital Betacam, color, 16:9 Shooting
Language German Shooting in Wildenranna (Bavarian
forest)
Contact:
Tangram Christian Bauer Filmproduktion
Herzog-Wilhelm-Str. 27 · D-80331 Munich
phone +49-89-2 36 60 60 · fax +49-89-23 66 06 60
www.tangramfilm.de · email: info@tangramfilm.de
Wildenranna is as picturesque as German villages come. It lies
in lower Bavaria, not far from Austria and the Czech Republic, in
an area of unsurpassed natural beauty famed for its gently rolling
hills, wide valleys and native forests. It’s home to nine hundred
people, has a church and a local bar. Winters are hard, summers
are short and cold. The local industries are agriculture and timber.
The 1930s saw a wave of emigration to the United States as
people sought their fortune overseas. Many returned, unable to
sever their ties with home. As the locals say, this feeling of
belonging, of being together, was always something special to
Wildenranna and still is.
MB
Alice Agneskirchner, Rudl Kurzböck (photo © Tangram Film 2001) in
production
The film’s author and director, Alice Agneskirchner, goes in
search of this special feeling of home and heart. In Wildenranna
everybody has their tale to tell. The people take life’s
many struggles and setbacks as they come, laconically, sometimes
ironically, with a smile and tear on their furrowed faces.
Places like Wildenranna will soon be a thing of the past as life
there becomes more and more like life everywhere else. And films
like Wildenranna will be all that remains to document what
once was.
There is a German film tradition known as the Heimatfilm. The
word ”Heimat“ itself translates into English as ”home“, as in
”home is where the heart is“. The genre enjoyed a boom in the
post-war years as cinemagoers sought escapism in harmless,
sentimentalized (kitsch, even) entertainment. But all these films
were based on idealized reality. They were fiction. Wildenranna
is the actuality and life is physically and mentally very hard.
Alice Agneskirchner was born in Munich and studied
Direction at the ”Konrad Wolf“ Academy of Film and Television
in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin. In addition to having made a
number of documentaries, she is probably one of the few industry
professionals who can claim to have worked as a horse trainer in a
circus and a cowgirl in Wyoming!
Producer Christian Bauer is responsible for more than fifty
documentaries and in 1993, after several consecutive nominations,
won the Adolf Grimme Prize, the equivalent of a German Emmy,
for his film on the last days of an American army garrison in
Bavaria, Der Ami geht heim.
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