ARRI Media Worldsales to handle Reitz's Die andere Heimat

Munich-based ARRI Media Worldsales is to handle international distribution on veteran German director Edgar Reitz’s Die andere Heimat which begins shooting from April 17.

The new feature film will again be located in his native Hunsrück region with the fictional village of Schabbach, as was the case with Reitz’s internationally feted Heimat trilogy, but the filmmaker is going back in time here to one of the most moving chapters in German history - the years between 1840-1843 when several thousand chose to emigrate to Brazil as a way of escaping the curse of famine and poverty.

Together with author Gert Heidenreich, Reitz had undertaken intensive research, viewed numerous documents and gathered the family stories of people from the Hunsrück to produce a moving screenplay  which reflects the historical events and makes the native landscape into a protagonist.

The new project will see Reitz – who turns 80 on November 1 – being reunited with Gernot Roll, the award-winning director of photography on most of the Heimat trilogy, and with composer Michael Riessler who wrote part of the score for Heimat 3 as well as the 2006 epilogue Heimat Fragments – The Women.

Die andere Heimat is being produced by Reitz’s cinematographer son Christian at ERF Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion in co-production with veteran French producer Margaret Menegoz’s Les Films du Losange and ARD Degeto for public broadcasters ARTE, WDR and BR. Funding has come from the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF), German Federal Film Board (FFA), FFF Bayern, the State Minister for Culture and Media (BKM), Eurimages and the federal state of Rheinland-Pfalz.

Shooting is expected to continue until August 2012, and a theatrical release in Germany is planned by Concorde-Film in 2013.

ARRI Media Worldsales had previously handled international sales on the Heimat trilogy and the epilogue Heimat-Fragments. The Women.