The North Sea from above

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Movie
Original title The North Sea from above
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2011
length 93 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Silke Schranz, Christian Wüstenberg
production Silke Schranz, Christian Wüstenberg
camera Peter Bardehle , Klaus chair
cut Silke Schranz, Christian Wüstenberg

The North Sea from Above is a documentary from 2011. The film by Silke Schranz and Christian Wüstenberg with aerial photos by Peter Bardehle and Klaus Stuhl shows the North Sea and its mudflat landscape exclusively from a bird's eye view. The film is a comfilm.de production in coproduction with Vidicom .

action

The recordings, filmed exclusively from a bird's eye view, are constructed as a journey, along the German North Sea coast from Emden in East Friesland over the Wadden Sea World Heritage Site , upstream the Elbe to Hamburg and then over the Halligen and islands in Schleswig-Holstein and ends at the northernmost point of Germany, on Sylt.

background

For the documentary film material from the ten-part Arte documentary series Germany's Coasts was used. Since Silke Schranz and Christian Wüstenberg saw some aerial recordings in this documentary series in October 2010, they contacted the Hamburg film production company Vidicom and learned that there was a total of over 40 hours of unused aerial film material. The images were filmed with the Cineflex camera, one of the best helicopter cameras that can take very sharp images from a great distance. The Cineflex camera has already been used in the international productions Die Erde von oben or Home .

Schranz and Wüstenberg acquired the license for four terabytes of image material on a hard drive, viewed 40 hours of the North Sea coast in one day, cut and condensed it. 40 hours of material turned into seven hours in one year, from these seven hours the two then cut 90 minutes as a journey along the North Sea coast. Wüstenberg comments on these pictures with a North German influence. For nine months beforehand, the directors researched facts about the coast and the Wadden Sea National Park , including talking to experts from German nature conservation organizations such as BUND , WWF and NABU . The noises in the film were recorded retrospectively by the filmmakers, as authentically as possible, in the same places where the pictures were taken.

Due to the success of the film, The Baltic Sea from Above was shot in the same way , which had its cinema premiere on May 3, 2013.

publication

The premiere of the film took place on May 31, 2011 in Hamburg's Abaton cinema . Since June 9, 2011 the film has been shown in the regular cinema program. The documentary was shown in more than 400 cinemas in front of more than 214,000 viewers, mainly in art house cinemas. Especially in northern Germany , the film will still be shown in 2013 in selected cinemas for special events or matinees in the cinema.

The film has been available on DVD and Blu-ray since November 10, 2011.

reception

The film was received very positively. The new perspective, which gives unusual insights into the landscape of the North Sea coast, and the Cineflex camera, which can deliver razor-sharp images from a great distance, were particularly emphasized.

In its review, the daily newspaper emphasizes the impressive images from the apparently dormant perspective. The found footage film offers postcard motifs that are provided with music, noises and a narrator, so that an easy-to-watch, albeit conventional, travel film was created. With the background music for the film, however, less effort was made, this was a " Muzak salad full of synthesizer melodies and classical quotes from Mahler to Satie ". Wüstenberg's comment, which the taz describes as “very engaging”, mixes information about the sea, land and people with amusing anecdotes in the style of a good tour guide. The North Sea from above is therefore “a cleverly built home documentation that is interrupted every few minutes by images of almost surreal beauty”.

The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger thinks that the film provides wonderful impressions of Germany's coast and should be understood as a unique journey into an ecological system that is combined with cultural landscapes . Wüstenberg's comment was taken as down-to-earth and thus as a “coherent text extension of the image mix of nature film, regional studies [and] eco-warning”.

Der Spiegel points out the differences between the television documentary Germany's Coasts and the film. Since the film never stops on land, but only shows the world of the mudflats from above, the film is not a copy of the television documentary. The film shows impressive natural events, but according to Wüstenberg it can not only show the works of art, it also addresses what humans do to the sea.

According to kino-zeit.de , the film consistently shows breathtaking images, “which sometimes make the coast appear almost like a film set from a fantasy fairy tale.” The film thus appears to be aimed at boosting tourism. Despite some cutbacks in the music and Wüstenberg's voiceover, which sometimes comes in a “slightly too casual, cheeky tone”, the two filmmakers succeeded in making a film thanks to the “grandiose images of the Cineflex camera”, “at least partially can keep up with the much more elaborate international productions. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Certificate of release for the North Sea from above . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry, April 2010 (PDF; test number: 122 031 K).
  2. ↑ a b Joachim Kurz: The North Sea from above - film. In: kino-zeit.de. Retrieved March 8, 2012 .
  3. ^ A b Julia Stanek: Film "The North Sea from Above": Works of art on the mudflat. In: spiegel.de. Spiegel Online , June 7, 2011, accessed March 9, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Lutz Pehnert: ttt - The North Sea from above. In: DasErste.de. The First , May 29, 2011, archived from the original on September 12, 2011 ; Retrieved March 8, 2012 .
  5. ↑ a b Seen from heaven. In: taz.de. the daily newspaper , June 9, 2011, accessed on March 8, 2012 .
  6. ↑ Press text: The Baltic Sea from above. In: die-ostsee-von-oben.de. comfilm.de, accessed on March 9, 2013 .
  7. ^ Frank Olbert: Geography from the air. In: ksta.de. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , July 15, 2011, accessed on March 9, 2013 .