The filmmaker Lenz leaves his home city Berlin for France's Vosges Mountains to research the background of Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz. Yearning to see his nine-year-old son Noah, he goes instead to the winter sports resort Zermatt in the Swiss Alps. There, Noah helps him arrange a meeting with his ex-wife Natalie, whom he still loves. A little idyll blossoms in the rediscovered closeness to his son and rekindled love for Natalie. But the illusion of happy family life is short-lived, soon overshadowed by Lenz's behavior, which grows ever stranger. Noah and Natalie return to Zurich. Lenz remains in the mountains, alone. Like his literary alter ego, the modern Lenz is a tortured visionary, a prisoner of his own fits of euphoria or despair. Imbach’s film captures these vehemently swinging moods with a wide range of visual and acoustic means. Lenz's volatile interior life finds an objective correlative in the elemental beauty of the alpine landscapes in which the film was shot. Above all, Lenz is the unconventional portrait of a man whose motto recalls the Romantic poets: The genius writes his own rules. Film and video, staging and improvisation, professional and amateur actors, tender love story and slapstick: Imbach shapes seeming opposites into a unified whole, supported by dramatic film music that combines folk songs, pop music, and processed natural sounds
Production: Bachim Film (Zurich), Pandora Filmproduktion (Cologne), Schweizer Fernsehen
Screenplay: Thomas Imbach, inspired by Georg Büchner's Lenz
Cinematographers: Jürg Hassler, Thomas Imbach
Composers: Peter Bräker, Balz Bachmann
Editors: Thomas Imbach, Jürg Hassler, Patrizia Stotz
Cast: Milan Peschel, Barbara Maurer, Noah Gsell, Barbara Heynen
Format, screen ratio: 35mm, 1:1.85, Color
Running time: 96 minutes, 25 frames/sec.
Languages: German, Swiss German
