Heimat

Halfway between a documentary and an artistic installation, Heimat, starting from the creative fragmentation of the Last Letters from Stalingrad, a collection of letters written in December 1942 by German soldiers besieged in the Stalingrad sack, is a sensorial and universal investigation of that very mysterious object that is the memory of Home: a mysterious, elusive object, always on the verge of fading.

In Heimat, the paste of old family films, brushstrokes of color and chemical residues of decomposing film coexist. A reality that becomes oneiric, almost hallucinatory. The images and sounds in Heimat express all their materiality, their being objects marked by time, consumed, and ruined. An extremely sensorial cinematic experience to reflect on memory what binds us to our affections and everything we call home. In a word: our Heimat.

The last letters from Stalingrad are a powerful reading, which first of all struck me for the extreme lucidity of the testimonies. Aware of having reached the end of their lives, no one justifies or complains: they describe themselves.

The Letters are also a narrative of all unseen in war, of the most intimate and inner dimension of remembrance, of memory. Some remember the first time with their beloved; those who remember the nights spent at the telescope, watching the stars; those who remember their performances at the theater, counting all the times they staged death.

For a moment, I forgot about the war, the soldiers, the trenches: I had been catapulted into a man's most crucial moment, that of reckoning. An intimate conversation, at the same time suffered but incredibly determined, in which the war appears in the background.
I had the impression that the text was shouting out the images to which to put it: not war footage, but family images, from all eras, in a continuous temporal short-circuit.

War is an extreme condition that serves as a gateway to an extraordinary and universal human experience. Hence the intention to portray these soldiers as men, trying, through the creative reuse of archival cinema, to give them back the image of their homes, wives, places, and affections. Moreover, through their renewed testimony, to speak to us, almost eighty years later, to reflect on memory, on what binds us to our affections, on everything we call home.