Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision

Set in a fictitious 1844 village called Schabbach, this four-hour dramatic look into German history chronicles the quests and conflicts of country families hoping to escape poverty and famine by forging a new life in Brazil. From filmmaker Edgar Reitz, following up his TV mini-series trilogy Heimat which was made from 1984 to 2004.

“The original Heimat became such a phenomenon in world cinema because it was both epic and precise. Beginning in 1984, Reitz made four separate long-form films that followed a fictional family in his rural home region, the Hunsrück. The series covered almost 100 years of German social history, from 1919 to the early twenty-first century, through an engaging domestic drama played out against the massive political jolts that rocked that nation, from the rise of and fall of the Nazis, through the division of Germany into East and West, and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall...

“Home From Home returns to Reitz's fictional village of Schabbach. In the mid- 1800s, village life is feudal and brief, with the airy beauty of the natural landscape standing in contrast to small-minded despotism and sudden disease. For those few who can lift their gaze beyond the next hillock or harvest, migration offers the only way out." (Toronto International Film Festival)

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