Ödenwaldstetten

Peter Nestler remains one of the most outstanding documentary filmmakers from German post-war cinema. Born in 1937, he created his first short documentaries from 1962 to 1965, including Mülheim/Ruhr (1964), Ödenwaldstetten (1964) and Rheinstrom (1965), which were a series of aesthetically meticulous and politically radical portraits of everyday life and working-class environment in Germany.
Peter Nestler once said, “Ever since I began making films, I have tried to show the very heart of the matter. I did this so spectators would remember and recognize things, and, in order to point out that something needs to be changed, needs to be preserved or must not be forgotten.” This statement emphasizes Nestler’s unconventional approach to filmmaking. His work introduced an entirely new and uncompromising style to German cinema, which was met with a profound lack of understanding by both audiences and critics. Decreasing working opportunities in his native Germany eventually forced Nestler to emigrate to Sweden in 1966, where he began to work with Swedish Television. He created cinematic essays, political travelogues and historical documentaries of a terse but absorbingly poetic style, attempting to capture and comprehend the world through film.

“The themes and the ideological sources of Nestler’s films reflect the attitude of the 1950s. It is a stance that tries to establish a functioning labor policy via anti-fascism and by rejecting anti-communism.“ (Harmut Bitomsky). Despite this remarkable attempt Nestler remained restricted in his working possibilities, and widely undiscovered for a long time.

In recent years Peter Nestler has traveled far to produce a number of feature films such as Pachamama in South America, Die Nordkalotte in Scandinavia and Flucht in France. These exceptional documentaries establish his reputation as one of the finest documentary filmmakers of our time; a director who remains to be discovered over and over again. As critic Jörg Huber remarks: “Nestler is shooting one large film, that will never end – in the same way that its narrator continues to spin his tale. Each single film is a paragraph or a chapter of this ‘book of life’, which endures time and space. What is captured in an image and what survives as an image is kept from falling into oblivion; it never appears entirely strange.” —Viennale