The filmmakers first meet Stefan in 2015, in the therapy ward of Brandenburg Prison. Together, they are part of the therapy group Masculinity and Identity. Their first impression of a polite, shy man is quickly called into question by one of the warders – he tells them Stefan is an ice-cold woman-killer. The filmmakers follow him through the last four years of his prison term. Stefan completes the modules of the therapy programme, one of the most progressive in Europe for the treatment of violent criminals and sex offenders. His release approaches. Increasingly, Wright and Kolbe ask themselves some uncomfortable questions: Can anyone really know what is going on inside this man? What can we really understand of his crime? How effective can any treatment for toxic masculinity be, in this world behind bars? And what are they really doing with this difficult protagonist? Stefan S. does not want to be recognizable in the film. The filmmakers move scenes they have shot into a theatre space. The part of the protagonist is taken by a puppet, manipulated by two female puppeteers. The film moves between forms, at the limits of representation. Truth and falsehood blend in a cascade of presumption.
Anamnesis (noun):
a recalling to mind (reminiscence)
a preliminary case history of a medical or psychiatric patient
Written & Directed by Chris Wright & Stefan Kolbe Puppeteers Nadia Ihjeij & Josephine Hock Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing & Sound Chris Wright Music Johannes Winde Set Design Luise Ehrenwerth Puppet Peter Lutz Post-Production Sound Soundgarten Colour Grading Alex Beyer & Stefan Kolbe Commissioning Editor Nicole Baum (3sat) Producer Heino Deckert Produced by ma.ja.de Filmproduktion and kolbewright in co-production with ZDF/3sat World Sales Deckert Distribution Theatrical Distributor GMfilms
Funded by Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen and Creative Europe Media.
Festivals Berlinale 2021, Forum CPH Dox, Copenhagen DK Thessaloniki, GR Batumi, Georgia Dokka, D Kassel, D Duisburg, D IDFA, NL
Sarah and Daniel are having a baby. Sarah is 19, Daniel 24. With Sarah, we made the film THE HOME, about her time in a children’s home. She was 12 back then, and her mother had been dead for 11 years. Later, we visited Sarah again. Her sister Nancy was pregnant, at 19. Sarah thought that was stupid. Sarah has a baby with Daniel and they call her Marie. Sarah, Marie and Daniel. Daniel also grew up without his parents. He tattoos his daughter’s name on his neck, above the swastika. A short film about the possibility of love in a world where love is seldom seen.
Written & Directed by Chris Wright & Stefan Kolbe Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing & Sound Chris Wright Sound Design & Mix Rainer Schwarte Music Robert Schumann Colour Correction Jakob Wehrmann Commissioning Editor Nicole Baum (3sat) Producer Heino Deckert Produced by ma.ja.de Filmproduktion and kolbewright for ZDF/3sat
MOTHER’S JOY was part of the series Ab 18! on ZDF/3sat.
Festival: Duisburger Filmwoche 2016
The sound material recorded for the film was also made into a separate radio documentary, TWO ORPHANS AND THEIR FIRST CHILD.
What happens when two atheist film-makers are given free rein in a religious seminary? A seminary in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther once launched the Reformation, but the percentage of Christians is now the lowest in Europe? For a year, Chris Wright & Stefan Kolbe followed a group of young men and women through the final phase of training for the Protestant priesthood. We see them learn the tools of religious practice. But gradually, the focus shifts; both protagonists and film-makers are confronted with the most fundamental human questions. The boundaries dissolve, between faith and scepticism, comfort and despair, truth and madness. What follows is an open, intimate dialogue on our longing for love, kinship and meaning.
Written & Directed by Chris Wright & Stefan Kolbe Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing & Sound Chris Wright Sound Design Rainer Schwarte Sound Mix Holger Lehmann Music Tobias Hume (Jordi Savall), Andrea Falconiero (Jordi Savall), Johann Sebastian Bach (Chris Thile), This Will Destroy You, Pinoreks Producer Heino Deckert Produced by ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion, kolbewright in Co-Production with MDR and ARTE TV Titles Pfarrer Werden (Germany), La Foi des pasteurs (France)
Funded by Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen, Deutscher Filmförderfonds and Gerd-Ruge-Project Fund of Film- und Medienstiftung NRW.
Poster Damien Tran (Screen print, signed and numbered edition of 100)
On the black earth of Germany’s agricultural heartland stands a medieval castle. Upstairs, seven teenagers and their carers. The boundaries of life are school and chatroom, clandestine date and job interview. Gradually, a year passes and the world grows with us. This is a film about finding your place in this world, in this time. And, inevitably, about carrying the burdens parents can lay on us.
Written & Directed by Stefan Kolbe & Chris Wright Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing & Sound Chris Wright Sound Design Rainer Schwarte Sound Mix Holger Lehmann Producer Stefan Kolbe Co-producer Meike Martens Music This Will Destroy You Postproduction Supervisor Niklas Bäumer A Stefan Kolbe Production in Co-Production with Blinker Filmproduktion
Postproduction supported by Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung Otherwise, this film was self-financed.
Festivals and Awards DOK Leipzig, 2010, German Competition (Jury of the German Competition, DOK Leipzig: Our Special Mention goes to the film THE HOME. The raw and direct film impressed us with its intense, closely observed scenes. We witness touching moments in the lives of seven teenagers, making their difficult way into an independent future away from their difficult families. Chris Wright and Stefan Kolbe create a unique filmic language, far removed from typical narratives. Claas Danielsen, Head of DOK Leipzig: THE HOME is a filmic jewel…
Duisburger Filmwoche, 2010 (THE HOME Minutes from the discussion at the Duisburger Filmwoche) Dokumentarfilmwoche Hamburg, 2011 Achtung Berlin, 2011, Main Competition
Presse
The result is stunning. A cinematic diary, edited associatively, with wonderfully fragmented storytelling. It is a film which never explains, but expresses a fundamental desire of the film-makers to understand. A film about the search for happiness, joy and satisfaction. (Marcel Ahrenholz) Text Player Kinomagazin
THE HOME manages a delicate balancing act, showing people in a decisive period of their lives with a sensitive mix of closeness and distance, never exposing its protagonists. They are all equal in front of the camera, becoming like one character. And yes, you’re there, listening. Why act as though you stand apart? At the end of the day, all you too are left with is the hope that everything will stay intact. (Christian Lailach) Text Schnitt
In camera, sound, editing and sound editing, THE HOME is a great example of what new technologies can bring documentary cinema – a professional standard which is far from industrial. Wright and Kolbe are the smallest possible team and they get the utmost reward. In its discretion, this is a highly political film which doesn’t need to state its implications but instead stands by its protagonists. (Bert Rebhandl) Text taz
In documentaries, there is an entire sub-genre about young people being brought back to the righteous path through dancing or boxing. Here, our materially increasingly divided society can celebrate supposed wholeness. But THE HOME doesn’t play into this. Kolbe and Wright discreetly, but determinedly avoid such mechanisms of instrumentalization. Because of this film, their film resists any easy use for pedagogic propaganda or institutional criticism. (Silvia Hallensleben) Text Tagesspiegel
Wright and Kolbe are less interested in the teenagers’ problems than in the teenagers themselves. How do they talk? What’s important to them? What do they want from their lives? The characters’ problems seem more like random turbulences in the eternal flow of time. (Theresa Sarafin) Text Junge Welt
The essence of this film – biological reproduction is not enough if social reporoduction fails. (Jan Brachmann) Berliner Zeitung
THE HOME does not suggest. THE HOME captures invisible conflicts flowing beneath the surface of everyday actions. (Norbert Wehrstedt) Leipziger Volkszeitung
Very much in the East German documentary tradition, Wright & Kolbe avoid all chatter, accept kurt answers which they build into a complex mirror of nuanced undertones. (Bernd Buder) Text Film-Dienst
Kolbe and Wright don’t make their protagonists into heroes of a pre-scripted narrative, don’t make them examples of how to overcome an unhappy childhood or not. Kolbe and Wright make us interested in these young people as they are. (Barabara Schweizerhof) Text epd Film
You could describe Stefan Kolbe and Chris Wright’s style as reduced narration. They have taken one principle of modern German documentary art to its logical extreme – and through their avoidance of any commentary they create an immense emotional effect. (Andreas Montag) Text Mitteldeutsche Zeitung
THE HOME feels out the interior life of its protagonists on a visceral, sometimes painful level, instead of just showing it. THE HOME is a film to be felt, its biggest strength the sense of being there, looking and withstanding what you see. (Beatrice Behn) Text kino-zeit.de
Chris Wright and Stefan Kolbe made their coming-of-age-mosaic THE HOME without TV support, in a children’s home in Saxony Anhalt, where the idyllic landscape serves as a poetic counterfoil to the troubled stories they tell in a pleasantly loose way. (Matthias Dell) Text Freitag
In THE HOME by Chris Wright and Stefan Kolbe, a familiar documentary subject is given an unfamiliar, open approach. The focus is less on the children’s home in the rural surroundings of Magdeburg, and more on the tentative process of getting close to its seven teenage inhabitants. The camera never forces itself on its protagonists, who sometimes wear the masks of teenage self-consciousness, then let those masks slip in moments of honesty. The mise en scene and the editing give the characters space and search for images where their emotional states can resonate, as they enjoy a fragile peace after difficult years. (Dominik Kamalzadeh) Text taz
Seeing God is not proof, says 13-year-old Kevin; feeling His love is the biggest proof. Kevin has felt it. And it was God who – years before his birth – brought Kevin’s family from Kazakhstan to Germany. Here he follows his parents several times a week to their Pentecostal Church. Because a healthy mind needs a healthy body, Kevin also boxes. Runner-up at the Weser-Ems Championships. That means training three times a week, and fitness workouts with his father in the garden. Kevin is tired. Later, he has no plans to study. “It makes you turn away from God quickly. The main thing is I have a wife, a dog, a good house and a good job. Of course, the garden has to be nice too. I’ll plant that myself, just like my father.” THE DISCIPLE is a film from a foreign world that is Kevin’s hectic daily life. A world of discipline and control, of mind and body.
Written & Directed by Stefan Kolbe & Chris Wright Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing & Sound Chris Wright Sound Mix Sebastian Kleinloh Production Supervisor Meike Martens Commissioning Editor Nicole Baum (3sat) Produced by ma.ja.de. in co-operation with Stefan Kolbe and ZDF/3sat
Supported by Bundesbeauftragter für Kultur und Medien Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung and MEDIA.
Festivals and Awards International Festival of Cinema and Religion, Trient 2010 Kasseler Dokfilmfest 2010 Oldenburger Kurzfilmtage 2010 (THE DISCIPLE wins the Oldenburg Short Film Award: “With sensitive and precise observation, the film-makers take us inside the daily life of a Russian family where everything is centred on faith. Without comment or judgement, the film-makers get very close to their protagonists. They have the courage to leave the audience with ambivalent feelings. Hence, the award at Oldenburg Short Film Festival goes to THE DISCIPLE by Chris Wright and Stefan Kolbe.”)
DAS BLOCK. One year. 2005. A German town, off the map, Gräfenhainichen. At its edge, the street Poetenweg. 85 identical one-room flats. Four of their doors open. Behind them two women and two men. Four generations. Four states of loss and loneliness. Outside, in the hallway, scrawled on the wall DAS BLOCK – people say, this house is alive. DAS BLOCK, a TV movie about four people, life and how it leaves them.
Written & Directed by Stefan Kolbe & Chris Wright Camera Stefan Kolbe Sound & Editing Chris Wright Sound Design & Mix Rainer Schwarte Line Producer Meike Martens Commissioning Editors Luciano Rigolini (Arte France) and Nicole Baum (3sat) A ma.ja.de. Filmproduction in Co-operation with Stefan Kolbe
Festivals Visions du Réel 2007, Nyon, Switzerland Crossing Europe 2007, Linz, Austria Duisburger Filmwoche 2007 (Minutes of the discussion) Hot Docs 2011, Toronto, Canada
Once there was Zschornewitz power station. Here, thousands of people turned coal into electricity. With the end of East Germany, the power station disappeared and with it all the work. What remained were the workers and the amateur film-makers. The memory of the people, recorded on reels. In dialogue with these images, a vision is born of a vanished past and a missing future. The small private joys alongside the larger, unfulfilled promise.
Written & Directed by Stefan Kolbe & Chris Wright CameraStefan Kolbe Sound & Editing Chris Wright Sound Design & Mix Rainer Schwarte Film Music Mine (sixeight), Johann Sebastian Bach (Mass in B minor)
A Stefan Kolbe Production in Co-production with the film school HFF Konrad Wolf, Potsdam-Babelsberg. Funded by Kulturelle Filmförderung Sachsen-Anhalt.
Festivals and Awards DOK Leipzig 2003 (International Competition, Special Mention of the Fipresci-Jury) Duisburger Filmwoche 2003 Sehsüchte, Potsdam 2003 Filmfestival Dhaka 2003 Göteborg Film Festival 2004 Werkleitz Bienale, Halle 2004 Visions du Réel, Nyon 2004 (Prix Kodak Suisse) Shadow Festival, Amsterdam 2004 (Kodak Shadow Award) Kasseler Dokumentarfilmfest 2004
TV Broadcasts 3Sat, MDR, Vpro Holland and TSRI Switzerland
In the last 60 years, the Curonian Spit changed hands nine times. It passed from Lithuania to France and was claimed several times by Prussia/Germany and the Soviet Union. Since 1945, this Baltic peninsula has been divided into Russian and Lithuanian parts. Pervalka is a Lithuanian village near the Great Dune. Fritz Jakait, the fisherman, has always lived here. It’s the end of the holiday season. The Germans end their search for the Tzar’s Amber Room. Fritz and his wife get ready for winter.
Directed by Stefan Kolbe & Chris Wright Written by Stefan Kolbe Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing & Sound Chris Wright Sound Design &, Mix Rainer Schwarte Music Sebastian Vogel & Thomas Kürstner A Stefan Kolbe Production in Co-production with the film school HFF Konrad Wolf, Potsdam-Babelsberg
Funded by Kulturelle Filmförderung Sachsen und Sachsen-Anhalt.
Festivals Visions du Réel, Nyon 2000 Ethnofilmfest Berlin 2001
Four beds beneath neon lamps and roaring fans. A corner of an underground car park is home to Siggi, Uwe, Teddy and Isabella.
So Isabella, let’s see what comes up. – I like the Golf because it’s so easy to park. – Yes, now we need seventeen. – Then we’d have three. – We picked eighteen, didn’t we? – No, seventeen! – Oh! – You’re so bad at the lottery! – No, Isa, three of our numbers came up. – One! – We’ve got the one. – Great! – And we’ve got twenty-six too. – So two of ours came up? – So far, two have come up. – Good! – Nothing? What the hell… – We had thirty, not twenty-nine… Oh, but we’ve got one. So we got three right. – Brilliant! You see. – Three of ours came up. – So how much have we won? – Maybe nine marks, or eight marks fifty. – Wow, that means we’ve covered the cost of the ticket. Nearly. – Nearly. – The adverts. (From the film)
Directed by Robert Jäger & Stefan Kolbe Written by Stefan Kolbe & Robert Jäger Camera Stefan Kolbe Editing Chris Wright Sound Rainer Schwarte A Production of the film school HFF Konrad Wolf, Potsdam-Babelsberg.
Festivals Duisburger Filmwoche 1997 Visions du Réel, Nyon 1998 Young Creativity Award of the Hessen Minister of Culture 1998
