Tage

While working on a film called Cinematic Letters, IFFR stalwart Peter Schreiner was diagnosed with cancer. Although the project was terminated for being logistically too demanding, his desire to make a new film remained. But what can you do when your beloved camera and tripod have become too heavy for you to carry, and setting up even a simple scene is an exhausting ordeal? 

Tage is not a memoir of Schreiner’s battle with his illness – this is merely hinted at, almost obliquely. Schreiner considered his ailing body above all an artistic challenge: What is possible, what can be developed from the set of options and perspectives such a state of being offers? Curiously enough, Tage turned into a variation of his last finished film, Garten (2019): a chamber piece shot almost exclusively in his house, featuring himself and his beloved wife Maria as well as some friends. It is also a return to a cinema of intimacy that he’d last essayed with Kinderfilm (1985). With all of that, Schreiner strove for and reached yet another level of artistic freedom with Tage, for none of his works to date are as light-footed in their movement: pure stream-of-conscious in a diaristic framework – a film as open as Schreiner’s restlessly searching soul and endlessly curious heart.

– Olaf Möller

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