HINTERLAND

HINTERLAND
2024–2025 | Double Projection | 17 min

Nominated for the Golden Hercules Award, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival 2025
Selected for Jury Screening, Hessian Film and Cinema Prize 2026

HINTERLAND is a film about the survival of history.

It begins like a fairy tale with the words “Once upon a time” and asks what remains when the last witnesses are gone. Between fairy tale and contemporary reality, the film moves through landscapes, images, songs and voices, tracing how the past continues to resonate within the present.

Created in Kassel, the city where the Brothers Grimm once collected their stories, HINTERLAND unfolds a poetic cinematic language inspired by the life and work of photographer Gerty Deutsch. One of the pioneering women photographers of the twentieth century, Deutsch fled Austria in 1938 and found refuge in London, where she became one of the first photographers to document children arriving through the Kindertransport. Her photographs remain a testimony to exile, resilience and the enduring dignity of those forced to leave their homes behind.

The film also grows out of my long-term project Living Memory, developed in London with Holocaust survivors and the second and third generations of Kindertransport families. Through these encounters, I came to understand how memory continues to travel across generations, shaping lives long after historical events have passed.

Without archival footage, HINTERLAND draws on original images, compositions and self-written songs that weave together memory, loss, transformation and survival. Fairy tales become vessels of remembrance, carrying stories across time when direct witnesses are no longer present.

At the heart of the film lies the song Die Gedanken sind frei. Sung for generations as an act of quiet resistance, it became a symbol of a freedom that cannot be taken away: the freedom of thought.

The project emerged from research developed in dialogue with the legacy of Gerty Deutsch and the history of the Kindertransport. Although conceived within an international exhibition context, the film has so far remained largely unseen due to the political circumstances surrounding its intended presentation.

HINTERLAND does not seek to accuse. It creates a space of resonance.

Where language begins to fracture, music remains.

In the midst of historical fractures and contemporary uncertainty, the film asks what role images, stories and songs can play when memory itself is at risk of disappearing. What remains when the last witnesses fall silent? And how do we preserve our humanity in times of uncertainty?