Lights from Afar

Faithful to her desire to accompany her protagonists within their own social and family circle, this time, Helga Reidemeister is one with the town. ‘A war zone’, such is the description of a crane operator of the immense construction zone of a new residential area. A once familiar environment has become a huge work site subjected to the inescapable laws of lucrativeness. Convivial places are increasingly rare. Lives recycle as best they can in the neo-trendy atmosphere that reigns in East Berlin since the reunification. It is within these cracks, in the alternating photographs taken by Robert of his town since the 1980s and the footage of Berlin’s late 1990s construction sites, that the ideas and questions of those that aqre freshly thrust into this world where ‘There is no alternative’, are offered a voice.

Jürgen Ellinghaus
Programmer, director