91-year-old German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, best known for the influential Heimat trilogy, has started shooting his latest film Leibniz, a portrait of leading Enlightenment thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
A German polymath and one of the founders of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the most important thinkers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Leibniz recounts five days in his life in the winter of 1704/05, when he is supposed to sit for a portrait painter at Herrenhausen Palace. When the session fails, a young female painter from the Netherlands takes over. She sets herself the task of capturing his whole personality in the picture, with all its achievements and hidden fears, getting Leibniz to open up his soul to her.
Edgar Selge stars as Leibniz, with Lars Eidinger, Barbara Sukowa, Aenne Schwarz, Antonia Bill and Michael Kranz in the other leading roles. Salome Kammer and Matija Chlupacek, among others, appear in supporting roles.
The producers are Ingo Fliess, who produced the Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge, and Christian Reitz.
Leibniz is a co-production of if… Productions with Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion with BR/arte, funded by BKM, FFF Bayern, FFA, DFFF, Nordmedia, Medienförderung Rheinland-Pfalz, distributed in Germany by Weltkino.
The screenplay is co-written by Gert Heidenreich and Edgar Reitz, with Matthias Grunsky as director of photography and Renate Schmaderer as production designer, Esther Amuser as costume designer and Birger Laube as make-up artist.
The film is being shot between September 20 and October 22.
Edgar Reitz was honoured earlier this year with the Berlinale Camera award, and has received numerous prizes including the German Film Award several times, a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the Luchino Visconti Prize at the Italian David di Donatello Film Awards, as well as a BAFTA Television Award.
Reitz’s feature film debut Mahlzeiten premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1967 and received an award as Best First Film. His works include Cardillac (1968/69), Geschichten vom Kübelkind (1969/71), Die Reise nach Wien (1973), Stunde Null (1976/77), Der Schneider von Ulm (1978) and the Heimat trilogy (1984-2004), which was shown in cinemas, at festivals and on television.
Die andere Heimat - Chronik einer Sehnsucht (Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision) followed on from the trilogy; it was awarded Best Film at the German Film Awards in 2014. His most recent work, Filmstunde_23, was co-directed with Jörg Adolph.
No comments yet