08 July, 2023
DokuFest is pleased to present two vital and inspiring works from the man who is arguably Europe's living great director most deserving of rediscovery.
His ardent admirers include Christian Petzold and Vienna-based British critic/programmer Neil Young, who proposed and curated this two-film tribute. Young also included the 27-minute "Im Lohmgrund" ('In the Lohm Valley') among his 10 submissions for Sight & Sound's most recent Greatest Films of All Time survey. An embracingly empathetic record of quarrymen and proletarian sculptors working (and boozing) side-by-side during a hot summer, it epitomizes Böttcher's career-long celebration of labor and the ways in which western "class" distinctions were successfully erased in East Germany (Böttcher ranks as the GDR's most important cinematic chronicler). The short also encapsulates Böttcher fascination with artistic creation — he himself is a painter of some note, under the name Strawalde.
His feature-length Caucasian travelogue "In Georgien" ('In Georgia') captures the mainly-rural splendors of this historic, diverse territory in the dying days of the Soviet Union with irresistible warmth and unfussily luminous pictorial splendor. At least one Georgian filmmaker has called it the best picture ever made about the country by a non-Georgian.
For more info click here.
