Moorland

Northern Germany, mid-1950s. A barren, windy moorland. The people try forgetting the war. They try forgetting the past. When gay writer and bohemian Emil, who fled to France in 1933, returns to the moor, no one here has been waiting for him.

But Emil needs closure. When he left, he also left his one love Heinrich behind. And now, as he wanders through the village, everything comes back: the memory of their summer of love. The memories of the crazy Lebensreform commune that Heinrich had founded here with some friends. Of Lilly, who was part of their relationship for a short while. And of the political conflicts of the 1920s that caused it all, the commune and their relationship, to fall apart again.

And he remembers the dark secret that must not be spoken about in the village: How one day the SA, with the support of the villagers, attacked the commune and almost beat Heinrich to death.

The village reacts with defensiveness and threats to Emil's digging into the past. The violence comes closer and closer, until finally Emil and the villagers face each other eye to eye.

Director's Statement

"The 1920s have always fascinated me as a decade of awakening. A whole youth, disgusted by industrialisation and war, went out into nature, threw off their uniforms and practised wild thinking. Women cut their hair short and demanded equal rights. Gays, lesbians and transsexuals raised their voices. Workers dreamed of new forms of collaboration.

But it's a contradictory, fractured time. grass-root democracy and blood-and-soil ideology, religios gurus, sport fanatics or liberal nudists - all of them claim to define this new society to come. And It's not always easy to draw clear lines between all those groups.

Moorland tells the story of Emil, a gay worker from the city who is forced to move to the countryside. His story is as torn as the story of his decade. Between being gay and being a worker, between the bourgeois life reformers and queer activists, communist and socialist revolutionaries he has to find his path.

For me, Moorland is the story of a lost utopian moment. A reminder of a situation in which an entire society sets out to reinvent itself, only (as we know today) to fail fundamentally. The film tells its story in two different timelines, the 1920s and the 1950s. This doubling of the timeline is, I think, necessary. By alternating between the gloomy 1950s, in which Emil tries to reconnect to a lost utopia, and the cheerful lightness of the 1920s we all know will not last forever, Moorland avoids falling into pure nostalgia of a lost time.

It quickly became clear to me that the story had to be set in the moors. Not only because the 1920s are far too often told as a big city story, while the countryside has to serve as a reactionary backdrop. In Moorland, the bogs are a creepy place, a place of resistant survival in a hostile environment, a mirror of Emil's psyche. But they are also an amphibious place, neither water nor land, a "queer" place full of protomatter and mud. It is the outcasts and criminals who have gathered here, at the edge of nature, at the edge of society. And it is they who, with their own de-formation, give rise to the hope of something new.

Both characters in the film, Heinrich and Emil, fail at this new beginning, and they fail in their very own way. The one by trying to create an impossible retreat, a safe space in which he can live out his life freely; the other by continuing to flee, restless and pursued. But the fact that they fail again and again, that history always opposes their hopes, does not deter them. People like Heinrich and Emil never stop dreaming."