Klaus Wildenhahn. DIRECT! Public and Private

At the center of this film is a film legend, Klaus Wildenhahn, a man who was responsible for reinventing documentary film in Germany. The film is an approach to a long, eventful life. Right from the start you are caught in the middle: The old man's apartment serves as an archive, a treasure trove, saturated with time. Books, paintings, photos pulled from shelves, stories told ... each of them leads out into the distance back into a time that has been long lost ... the viewer ventures through Quinka Stoehr's film as a traveller, as a discoverer. Hamburg, Berlin, Ostend, Belgium ... the old man gives lectures here, has events there ... experiments about cinema, art, life, how it all comes together ... how powerful images can be, and why they move in the way they do, how they connect with the distant. Klaus Wildenhahn combines cinematic narration with jazz and African American music. He uses documentary films as a means to stir up the rural population and local media institutions.
Quinka Stoehr records everything, adds her own discoveries, and turns all of this into an intimate, moving cinematic portrait. Then an illness turns the tides ... forming the man ... how does it go on ... but Wildenhahn tells his story unbroken, goes his own way, and continues to embody cinema. "DIRECT! PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" - the title of this film comes across as something from the yellow press. An expectation which Quinka Stoehr most delightfully unfulfills.

Michael Girke, Infomedia S-H

• International Film Festival Triest I mille occhi
• International DOK.fest festival Munich
• International film festival Hamburg
• International documentary film festival Leipzig
• Nordic Film Days, Lübeck
• Blicke: 18. Ruhr area film festival Bochum
• Diusburg Fim Week, Special Screening