The 91-year-old German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, director of the Heimat trilogy, will be honored at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival with the Berlinale Camera Award.
Reitz will receive the prize, which honors “personalities and institutions who have made a special contribution to filmmaking and with whom the festival feels closely connected,” at the 74th Berlinale on Feb. 22. The award ceremony will be followed by the world premiere of Reitz’s latest work, Filmstunde_23, co-directed with Jörg Adolph, which will screen out of competition as part of the festival’s Berlinale Special program.
Considered one of Germany’s most influential and important directors, Reitz is best known for his three Heimat films, from 1984, 1992 and 2004, which were presented both as feature films and as television series. The film cycle traces a century and a half of German history as seen through the lives of the Simons, a fictional family from the Hunsrück area of Rhineland-Palatinate, where Reitz grew up. The director revisited the film cycle in two more works, Homeland Fragments: The Women in 2006, which uses deleted scenes and outtakes from the previous films to focus the story on epic’s female characters; and in the prequel film Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision in 2013, which looks at two Simon brothers who emigrate from Germany to Brazil in the 1840s. Together, the 5 films, divided into 32 episodes, have a running time of more than 59 hours.
Reitz was one of the authors, and original signatories, to the 1962 “Oberhausen Manifesto,” a call to arms for a new German cinema movement, which is credited with making the birth of German auteur cinema in the post-war period.
“Edgar Reitz is one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation; he has created an oeuvre that will forever remain a milestone in the history of cinema,” said Berlinale executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian in a statement. “At 91, Reitz is still willing to question who we are and where we come from. In his latest work, Filmstunde_23, he succeeds in transposing the idea of home – as both a real and an imaginary place of longing – to the cinema. We are delighted to welcome his new film to the festival and to award him this much-deserved recognition.”
Reitz will add the Berlinale Camera to a trophy case of awards, including multiple German Film Awards, including the best film honor for Home from Home in 2014, a BAFTA in 1986 for best foreign TV series for Heimat 1, and the best first feature award at the Venice Film Festival for his 1967 debut Table for Love. Over his long career, Reitz has directed more than 50 features, documentaries and works for TV.
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