Carolin Weidner: Anna Maria Ortese is very present in AUSLANDSREISE, your fourth feature film, through her literature. Why this author, why her books?
Ted Fendt: I discovered Ortese's literature in 2015 through a recommendation by Giovanna Giuliani. She is an Italian actress and screenwriter whom I knew from a film by Jean-Marie Straub. I was in Paris at the same time as her and we met and talked about literature and other things in a mixture of French and Italian. She said that Ortese was the best author in Italy for her and that I absolutely had to read her. I immediately bought the French translation of ‘The Lament of the Linnet’ in a bookshop and was enchanted by it. After that, I read ‘The Iguana’ in English, and somehow that was it for a few years. When I was looking for a book for the film in early 2024, the idea of a reading group was already there. And Anna Maria Ortese seemed like a good starting point to me. ‘The Port of Toledo’ had just been translated into German and published, and I bought it immediately, knowing that it would play a role in the film. I didn't come across ‘The Iguana’ until later. I gave Leonie Rodrian ‘The Lament of the Linnet’ to read first.
Barbara Wurm: Was Leonie Rodrian involved from the beginning?
TF: Exactly. She was the first person I cast. First there was the idea for a project that was to be filmed in my neighbourhood, followed by the idea that it should be with people from the area. And then I looked for someone who reads and writes a lot and has interesting things to say about literature. And Leonie is that person; I've known her for about ten years. She was the first and most important person of all. We then wrote the film scene by scene over the course of a year.
CW: You and Leonie together?
TF: Exactly. On the very first day of shooting in May 2024, there were only two scenes. I then wrote the next scene for the next day of shooting in June, and after that I had a pretty clear idea of where the story was going. I wrote the dialogue and Leonie revised, supplemented, changed and improved it. That was basically the script for the shooting days. And ‘The Iguana’ was added in September, I would say. A new translation was supposed to be published in the Friedenauer Presse at the end of 2024; in the end, it came out in January 2026, after several postponements. At the same time, I thought that if there was going to be this new or revised translation, we could contact the translator and talk to her. That's how I came to engage more deeply with ‘The Iguana’.
BW: Did you work on the script again with the translator Sigrid Vagt?
TF: She was very involved in writing the dialogue for the scene with her. I wrote a first draft. Leonie revised it extensively and Sigrid then continued. First at home, then during rehearsal and finally on the day of shooting.
CW: Did the idea for the film title (FOREIGN TRAVEL) come up in a conversation between Sigrid and Leonie? That was my association when Leonie decides to travel to Naples at the end.
TF: The title came relatively late. Over the years, I find it increasingly difficult to come up with titles. I filled several pages in notebooks with possible titles, just free associations. At some point, I came up with this one and I liked it because Leonie is in Naples before the film. She discovers this book there and then goes back there afterwards. It speaks a little about the off-space in the film. And it also corresponds a little to Alejo's situation, who travelled from Argentina to Germany. There are also biographical elements in Ortese's life that have to do with travelling abroad.
I try not to overload the characters with a fictional story.
CW: I'd like to pick up on this notion of the off-space. I have the feeling that this is a central element, not only in this film, but also in your other films. One often has the feeling that things are implied, that your characters are preoccupied with themes that are only hinted at, but which are nevertheless palpable. You don't explain anything. Hence my thought about the off-space. Do you work with this consciously? Do you want to leave everything a bit mysterious?
TF: I think that's perhaps a side effect of my attempt not to overload the characters with a fictional story, because I'm always interested in the space between the documented person and the fictional character. Somehow, you always have both in the film. You can emphasize one or the other. And by leaving certain things out, viewers may have the opportunity to see the filmed person in front of the camera first and then the fictional character. At the same time, I've had a problem with too much orientation from the beginning. I don't want to give viewers too much orientation and I assume that you can read and interpret a lot from observing the characters. I want to keep that space free somehow.
CW: That reminds me of the conversation about ‘The Iguana’, in which Leonie says that she appreciates groping in the dark. And in your films, you also grope in the dark a little, but then again you don't, because you provide a specific frame of reference. As an audience, you recognise the cities, you know pretty much exactly where Leonie is in the Bergmannkiez neighbourhood. How do you determine that framework? You've also shot several films in Philadelphia, and at some point it seemed to me that I was already familiar with a certain intersection.
TF: Yes, that's right. For the films in the USA, I often shot at the same intersection several times within a single film, partly to show the location throughout the year, in different light and weather conditions. Here in Berlin, it was also a practical decision: I knew I wanted to do something rather small and very low-key. For my last film, I shot within Berlin, between Charlottenburg and Kreuzberg. And even travelling from Kreuzberg to Charlottenburg was a challenge for me. This time, I thought I'd do it right in my neighbourhood, so I wouldn't have to carry the camera so far, I'd know the locations and could decide each day where I wanted to shoot. I can observe the light and decide spontaneously.
BW: Do you then rediscover the locations? Or does the making of the film consist of capturing your perception as accurately as possible?
TF: No, I'm very open to whatever happens on the day. I think the most complicated thing is always getting all the people and the technology together in one place. What I really enjoyed was seeing how the light and the neighbourhood change over the course of the year. Sometimes subtly, sometimes less subtly. For example, we lit all the scenes with sunlight only, both indoors and outdoors. Fortunately, in Jenny Lou Ziegel, who did the camera work and whom I've known for 10 years now, I found someone who was very good at handling this. So the light is different in every scene. I hadn't expected that beforehand. Even in the sound mixing, I'm careful to keep as much of the original sound as possible. Because I find this uniqueness so beautiful. Sometimes the children in the backyard were very loud, sometimes less so, and you can feel that in the scenes.
I'm just very fond of analogue projection. As long as it's still possible, I try to work with it.
CW: You started making films in the early 2010s, reliably on 16mm. Is that a decision you made? Or could you imagine breaking with that in the future?
TF: When I was 17, 18, 19 and discovered cinema seriously, I had a few cinema experiences that were very formative. These were films shot on 16mm. At the same time, we were also shooting on 16mm at university back then. I was in the film department at New York University from 2007 to 2011. They mainly worked with analogue film there, and I really liked that and wanted to continue working with it. Now I even appreciate defending analogue cinema in its final days by still trying to make film copies. And 16mm is simply cheaper than 35mm. I was on the phone with the negative cutter an hour ago. The copies won't be ready for the Berlinale because we need more time. But there will be two copies. I'm just very fond of analogue projection. Maybe in ten or fifteen years it won't be possible anymore, and then I'll have to think of something else. But as long as it's still possible, I'll try to work with it.
CW: Perhaps related to that is the fact that all your feature films have a running time of one hour.
TF: Yes.
CW: Considering the film material, is there room for improvisation, or is the script written precisely to fit into this hour?
TF: The fact that the films are all this long, or this short, is not planned at all. I would really have to sit down and try to consciously write something that is 90 minutes or longer. My breath lasts 63 minutes, apparently. I'm also not someone who always shoots 10 or 15 takes. It's more like three to five. With this film, it was even significantly less, sometimes two or three. I didn't see that as a limitation, because it had more to do with the fact that I was working on a smaller scale. This time, it was also financially difficult, so I bought the minimum amount of material. In the past, I was able to buy a little more, but I didn't really need it. I think it has to do with the fact that we weren't trying to make the acting bigger and bigger or achieve certain emotions. It's more sober – and for that, you may need fewer takes.
BW: Is it true that AUSLANDSREISE is your first collaboration with Hans Broich as a producer?
TF: That's right, yes. Hans basically saved me. I'm very bad at maths and at the beginning I calculated how much material I could afford per month. And it was completely wrong. After the third day of shooting, I realised that I needed support to be able to shoot until the end of 2024. I called Hans and asked if he had any ideas, and he was totally enthusiastic and jumped on board right away. In the end, he also invested a little money from his company and bought a few rolls of film. And the flat where Sigrid Vagt is seen is his family's flat, which also has an interesting history in relation to Vagt.
BW: Why? What does the flat have to do with it?
TF: I didn't want to shoot at her home. I thought it would be too intrusive. So I chose another location. I knew this flat because I had been to Hans's place once and it's very nice, large and bright. Sigrid came to the rehearsal, walked in and said, ‘I'm having a déjà vu. I've been here before. I was here in the 1970s.’ Before Hans' mother bought it, the flat belonged to Merve Verlag, the publishing house where Heiner Müller worked, among others. Sigrid was an editor at Merve Verlag in the 1970s, and this was the office where she worked at the time.
BW: Great.
TF: So you don't see her at home, but in a house she knows very well from 50 years ago.
People express something about themselves when they share their perspective on a book.
CW: I'd like to come back to literature, because it's a very important theme in your films. Perhaps most strongly in CLASSICAL PERIOD. That film is all about Dante and, in a sense, a reading group. What fascinates you about it? You translate yourself, and I assume that literature plays a big role in your life.
TF: Yes, I read constantly and very passionately. With CLASSICAL PERIOD, a friend suggested that I should incorporate my literary interests into a film. At the time, I was preoccupied with Proust, and we – this friend and I – talked about the salons in Proust and how interesting it would be to set the salons in American suburbs, with a completely different kind of people. I think books are very helpful to me when I'm trying to write dialogue. People express something about themselves when they share their perspective on a book. The way they talk about it, their attitude, is very telling and incredibly fascinating to me. You don't necessarily have to have read the books or fully understand the content of the conversations. You can still watch the scenes and take something away from them because you can learn a lot about people from their body language and intonation. It's like sitting in a café and watching two people without really being able to hear the conversation. You can still understand something. The books give me an opportunity to see people in conversation.
BW: What is it like to film these reading scenes, which I think are absolutely brilliant?
TF: I really enjoy listening to other people in a quiet room. It's very focused. There are only three of us behind the camera on set, plus the person sitting in front of the camera reading aloud.
CW: Your films are ensemble films in a way, and I often feel that you are also part of this ensemble, even if you are not directly visible, except perhaps for your small appearance in OUTSIDE NOISE. Your films often tell of transitional spaces, an in-between, your characters have one foot here and one foot there. You have also lived in different cities and countries. How much of ‘Ted’ is in your films?
TF: That's something I only realised later. I think I used to choose people from my circle of friends or acquaintances because something they told me about their personal lives gave me the opportunity to identify with them. As a result, the films also speak about me, indirectly. While shooting AUSLANDSREISE, I was in psychoanalysis and dealt extensively with my history and my thoughts. Perhaps that made me more open to incorporating personal things about myself directly into the film. Everything Florian says, for example, is based on my experiences. I think that was always there, but in this film I worked with it deliberately.
CW: How do you integrate filmmaking into your life in general?
TF: I do all kinds of jobs – translating, projection and so on – to earn money for the next film reel. Fortunately, I have a neighbour who is a photographer and also has a 16mm camera and a tripod. That meant I could always film something when the opportunity arose.
BW: It almost seems to me as if one thing flows very organically from the other. And it also occurs to me that you may be consciously or unconsciously performing an inversion or a shift of what the Berlin School is or how Berlin films might sound today. And the inversion that strikes me as most socio-political is that the lingua franca is not English, but stubbornly German. And that this leads to a turn towards language, to a completely different awareness of language or language use.
TF: Yes, I think learning and speaking foreign languages is extremely important, and that has biographical roots for me, which I don't need to go into. I know how important it is to learn a language in order to become more deeply integrated into society and also to be able to understand the society in which you live. I can hardly imagine living here or in another European country and not learning the local language. And that's also a little bit what Leonie hints at towards the end of the film. That she wants to read Ortese in Italian. The translator even says she can hardly imagine anyone not reading Ortese in Italian because it's so unique. And if you're bilingual or multilingual, you know how difficult translation is and how often it is impossible.
