Die Andere Heimat: Edgar Reitz's epic German drama gets a cinematic prequel

'Home Away from Home' film goes back 150 years to explore origins of Simon family in years leading up to 1848 revolutions
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Die Andere Heimat
Die Andere Heimat stars Antonia Bill, left as Jettchen, and Philine Lembeck as Florinchen. Photograph: Christian Lüdeke/Concorde Filmverleih

At 53 hours and 25 minutes, it was already the longest series of feature-length films in cinema history. And now it is getting a four-hour prequel. This week the fourth instalment in Edgar Reitz's arthouse saga, Die Andere Heimat (Home Away from Home), will open in German cinemas.

Heimat, which loosely translates as "home" or "homeland", premiered on German television in 1984 and followed the life of the Simon family in the fictional village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland. Having set out to write one feature-length film, Reitz produced 11 interlocking screenplays, depicting village life from the end of the first world war to 1982. BBC Two screened the original series over 11 consecutive nights in 1987 and it became an unlikely cult hit.

Then came the sequels: a second part, released in 1992, zoomed in on one of the Simon sons who ran away to Munich's avant garde art scene; the third series took the viewer from the fall of the Berlin wall to the start of the new millennium. Die Andere Heimat goes back 150 years to explore one of the lesser-known dark chapters in German history: the years leading up to the 1848 revolutions.

"I feel as if I wandered into a forest and came across a path I thought would take me back home", said Reitz, speaking in Mainz, close to where Heimat was filmed. "But instead I wandered deeper and deeper into the forest and came across new places I hadn't known before."

In Germany Die Andere Heimat has already been hailed as a "terrific completion of his masterpiece" by Der Spiegel. Set in the 1840s, it shows the village of Schabbach suffering from food shortages, battered by a series of freezing winters and under the yoke of autocratic Prussian rule. The Portuguese emperor is recruiting young Germans to colonise Brazil, and throughout the film the horizon is filled with caravans heading for the next port.

Die Andere Heimat Period costumes were sourced from Rhineland villages. Photograph: Christian Lüdeke/Concorde Filmverleih

"Nowadays in Germany we find it hard to understand what it really means to emigrate, because we only know the other side of the problem: we have become a country that others emigrate to," Reitz says. A story of people leaving their home, he hopes, might help others to better understand the immigrants of today.

As with the previous films in the series, many actors were recruited from the Rhineland and speak in its dialect; one of the leads is played by a blacksmith from Lauterecken who had never stood in front of a camera in his life.

Period costumes were sourced from Rhineland villages and actors wore them for weeks on end in order to get used to how their body moved in the rough fabric. Instead of filming in restored historical buildings, Reitz's team spent almost an entire year rebuilding a 19th-century village from scratch.

Die Andere Heimat partly owes its existence to two incidents in Reitz's life. The first was a letter from a nurse in Porto Alegre, who told him that her boss had the same surname. Reitz's research revealed that the Brazilian doctor's family could be traced back to the same region of Germany he was born in.

Then, in 2008, his brother Guido died, and when Reitz went through his possessions he discovered that his sibling had spent years studying South American indigenous languages – without ever having left his home town in the Hunsrück. The new film tells the story of two brothers, Jakob and Hugo Simon, the younger of whom immerses himself in the rituals of Amazonian tribes.

The film also features another brother figure of sorts: Werner Herzog, in a cameo as the explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Alongside the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herzog is one of the two most influential directors to emerge from the New German Cinema movement of the 1960s.

"It may look as if Werner and I have followed quite different paths: he was always travelling to the rainforests of South America, the north pole or the highest mountains. I, meanwhile, only moved within a small rural parameter. But at the end of the day, Schabbach and El Dorado are the same."

Reitz arguably has a more devoted a fan base abroad than at home in Germany: British fans flock to the village of Woppenroth where the series was filmed, and scriptwriter Peter Moffatt openly admitted he wanted to create "a British Heimat" with the BBC's recent The Village.

To Reitz, the current appetite for series-length TV drama confirms the value of the film-making he pioneered. "The kind of epic storytelling we see in US dramas like The Wire or Breaking Bad is essentially a continuation of what I started doing 30 years ago. The classic theatrical story arc, which Hollywood films continue to pursue, is increasingly out of touch with everyday life – it assumes a certain bourgeois idea of morality."

He has one problem with the makers of modern TV drama: "They tell interesting stories and create interesting characters, but the images they create are not unforgettable. It's a question of intensity. As long as we are still in command of the images we create, they are not unforgettable. The images have to become stronger than their makers."

Ironically, just as US film-makers such as Steven Soderbergh are turning to TV, Reitz is doing the opposite: Die Andere Heimat is the first in the series to be filmed for cinema (no British release has been confirmed yet).

"Television has developed in a very negative way in Germany. There's little room for artistic freedom," says Reitz, who turns 81 this year. "I am at an age where I don't have a lot of patience with lack of freedom."

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