emptylands (2013)

Emptylands stages picturesque memories between oral history and surreal reenactment. It's an embodied journey through associations that is linking personal myths to cultural ones. A striving protagonist enters those immaterial archives and scenic landscapes to find individual spaces. If any escape there is, it arises from legitimation of his own struggles and hopes. Shot in Kassel, Berlin, Salzburg, Amiens, and Dhaka over a period of almost two years while working and touring with a theater piece "Odyssey Complex", which was profoundly interwoven with Emptylands footage, the final movie interrogates this journey beyond geographical and political borders. Personal freedom in times of cross-cultural deficit is an issue to be discussed in a stoic sense through using individual thoughts to activate a collective change. Emptylands subjects this idea and embraces the risks of an introspective, a hunt, and a continuous quest. direction: Felix Mathias Ott, Benjamin Brix, Steffen Martin.