16 October – 6 December 2009
Many of Roland Gräf’s works were both films and memorable landscape portraits, showing East Berlin during the 1960s in Jürgen Böttcher’s “Jahrgang 1945”, Bitterfeld’s morbid industrial landscapes in “Bankett für Achilles”, Mecklenburg’s hills and lakes around Feldberg in “Fallada – Letztes Kapitel”, or Thuringia’s woodland between Saalfeld and Gera in “Fariaho”.
The Babelsberg-based director, who spends part of the year in his house in Fläming, showed a selection of landscape pictures he took there as well as astonishing, visionary metamorphoses that are hardly recognizable as photographs.
In addition to these works, the exhibition featured his film “Fariaho” (1983), a tragicomic road movie about a travelling puppet player and former concentration camp prisoner. During GDR times, the film was only shown in art-house cinemas.
Back then, film critic Fred Gehler commented: “The film’s narrative shell contains both: the dismal nightmare of banality and shallowness, the trauma of soullessness, but also uplifting tenderness and love. Tenderness towards others, love for a dream.”