"Volker Sattel presents a sketch of the contemporary German condition. He scrutinizes odd views of the
New Berlin in the wake of Germany`s transforming caplital.
The city celebrates itself with a new face, a new representation of power. Within this fragmented assembly of cityscapes, Sattel inserts tropes of Berlin's new entertainment culture,
and its relentless, subversive countercultures. The work evokes many questions about urban experience here and elsewhere."
"An unusual portrait of a moving city, in which it is not the object that has
a special meaning but the picture because, as it seems, the reality is something that exists only in our feelings and senses. Exploding Berlin, the new metropolis of the unified Germany, is not shown in the film as
a quickly changing space; on the contrary, Volker Sattel puts emphasis on non-exciting moments which are in motion in static images. For him the reality is the structural masonry of the city, expression-perfect reproduction of the scene which requires its time in order to transform itself into a single meaningly important image. Discovery of the slowness gives the advantage
of distant observing of gestures and movements of people in surprisingly empty gaps of the city, in the free space of its crannies, streets, parks, and the covers behind the houses.
The rooting of the motionless images into one's memory is then multiplied by the music of Tim Elzer. In its originally murmuring rhythm we gradually begin to recognize the patterns of existence in the city, the mechanism of repeating the life manifestation inside it. The energy of the big gatherings of people, such as the sexual love parade or the demonstration of antiglobalists driven away by water guns, functions in a counterpoint way. The decorative frame of the city is disturbed only by the power of the human mass. The director was shooting in the city streets and on its peripheries for more than one year; each rendering came out of waiting: a man binds himself to the detail of a thing, at first there is the frame of the picture itself, only then there is movement and gesture. Fractions of the stories captured, when we know that each of them is encompassed in mere
walk, are mixed up, pieced together into stories new, indentically incomplete. Due to the stationariness of the initial material, let's think more of the photomontage than about the editing. The wide-angle objective opens up the city, through shooting the quivers between the walls is gradually created something new, something that may come from what is being pictured but it evokes rather an impression of new images where the shapes of commonplaceness are unexpected and revealing in the perspective of the composition. From consistent work arose an atmospheric and disconcerting picture of the present Berlin, where the newly observed well-known reality brings a message from a world that is confidentially unknown to us."
