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Storytelling has a long tradition in the Hunsrück, the region which I come from. From my earliest childhood I was familiar with the give and take which develops between storytellers and their audiences. Here there are often other rules than in academic dramaturgy, since the things that are dealt with always relate to a common experience of life. To that extent filmmaking has always been a very personal matter for me.
As much as our audience expects storytellers to elaborate their stories and make them larger than life, they also expect that the stories will „fit“, will match up to life and be credible. I have always felt a duty to this expectation and it carries more weight for me than any aesthetic cleverness or commercially chasing after effect. Unlike the previous HEIMAT cycles, HEIMAT 3 takes place in the recent past for which we still seem not to have achieved a narrative distance. Storytelling has its origins in personal recollection. But when we consider how quickly the East Germans have forgotten what GDR money looked like, we can guess how quickly the D Mark country will be transformed in our memories after the introduction of the Euro. This distance also affects storytelling. As a director I interpret the script. And particularly, when I have written it myself or with a co-writer, I have to achieve a fresh perspective for the production. A director has always to ask himself what it must be like never to have seen the images before, and never to have heard the story before. With this problem I hope that lesson I learned from the audiences of the previous HEIMAT cycles will help me: that the way to people’s hearts is through my own soul; only someone who understands himself can also be understood by others. Edgar Reitz
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