I am intentionally skirting around saying much about the film itself or the experience of watching it so as to allow people to discover it for themselves and since I too am still discovering much about it during the completion.
To make my films in the United States, I developed a system allowing me to finance them independently and work at my own pace and pursuing my own aesthetic interests. With AUSLANDSREISE I applied and adapted that system to my new living and working circumstances. Mainly, this involves calculating how much money I can set aside to shoot per month, and working accordingly.
From the outset, I set a few parameters: filming one day a month over the course of a year, filming only in my neighbourhood in Berlin, filming with people who lived in or nearby the neighbourhood, filming only with available light, writing the dialogue for the scenes in advance, having a book at the centre as a source for generating dialogue. There was also an aesthetic check list I showed to the cinematographer, at the top of which stood “old man film”.
We shot from May 2, 2024 to May 2, 2025, sometimes two days a month, rarely full days. On day one, the only written scenes were the ones we shot. Same for days two and three in June. At that point, I could see where the rest of the story would go and wrote an outline. But we continued to write the dialogue month by month. Usually, I would write a first draft, and Leonie, the lead actress, would revise and rewrite, before I divided the scene into shots and sent it to the other cast members. They were also allowed to customize dialogue to fit their mouths.
The film grew as the months passed, informed by the work of Anna Maria Ortese, which we were all reading more or less intensely, and which planted seeds in the film reflected serendipitously in the world around the characters. I first read Ortese in 2015, but only while working on the film did I realise how much had been translated into French and Spanish, if not so much into German or English.
Ted Fendt
