Heimat 1 by Edgar Reitz

Restoration and long-term preservation

The feature film cycle Heimat by Edgar Reitz is one of the greatest television and cinematic works of the 20th century. The 933-minute epic, filmed in both black-white and colour in 1981/82, garnered numerous German and international film awards and is regarded as one of the key cinematic works dealing with German history. Presently, there is only one existing cinematic copy of the film, which is in very poor condition. In response to festivals and cultural organizations which have shown interest in showing the film again, this project intends to completely restore the film reels and produce new 35-mm copies. Because of the way the black-white and colour segments were mixed, the original negatives were never compiled into a complete master copy, but were stored as separate reels at the Federal Film Archive. To produce new copies, the organizers will have to create new colour grading for the entire work. The director Edgar Reitz will be involved in the project and will artistically supervise the entire restoration process together with the cameraman Christian Reitz. Their goal is to produce a high-quality digital master copy and a spliced compilation of the archive negatives for a future cinematic release.

Artistic director: Edgar Reitz and Christian Martin Reitz
Funding period: 1 Sep. 2011 – 20 May 2013