Here is the fifth epic in Edgar Reitz’s supra-epic Heimat series about the fictional German village of Schabbach in the 20th century; this takes us back to the 19th, with dirt-poor farmers and labourers dreaming of escape by emigrating to Brazil. The movie’s German title is Die Andere Heimat (that is, The Other Homeland) and it’s subtitled Chronik Einer Sehnsucht — the English version translates this last word as “vision” though “longing” is more accurate and apposite.
Reitz films in a beautiful, crystalline monochrome with incidental details picked out in colour, which often has the effect of flattening the perspective of each shot and making it close to a hyperreal engraving. It is nearly four hours, but never dull for a moment; indeed, there is a boxset addictiveness to the whole thing.
Jakob (played by Jan Dieter Schneider, looking weirdly like a Germanic Zach Braff) is a dreamer, a Romantic, a reader, always getting yelled at by his blacksmith dad for idling. He has conceived a passionate desire to leave the grind and oppression and emigrate to the promised land of Brazil — a “homeland” that is an alternative both to Germany and the church’s feebly promised heaven.
Perhaps, like the Godfather movies, the Heimat series will be re-edited in narrative sequence, and this will confer a greater, or a different meaning to the events in this movie. At present, it is superlatively well performed and well directed with a real narrative grip.
