Patience (After Sebald)

The point of departure for Grant Gee’s latest film, after his award-winning documentary Joy Division, is W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn, a description of the latter’s long hiking tour of East Anglia. The film follows Sebald’s route, but as is the case in the book, the landscape and the places the author visited occasion contemplations.
Some twenty writers, artists and other creative minds. including authors Rick Moody and Iain Sinclair, theatre director Katie Michell and artists Tacita Dean and Lise Patt, explain Sebald’s impact on their work. They also provide their interpretations of the book which, besides recording a walk, is also a sightseeing tour of the horrors of the twentieth century.
The commentaries, the excerpts read by Jonathan Pryce and fragments of interviews with the German writer – who died in 2001 – create an impression of an original thinker who managed to shape his fascination with and fear of catastrophes in an exceptional manner.