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Juliane Henrich

Time Before Land

Doc. expérimental | 0 | couleur | 80:0 | Allemagne, Pologne | 2021

A woman arrives in a Polish village. As the director’s alter ego, she embarks on a search. An ancestor, we learn, originally came from this region of Silesia. The film follows her journey through the summertime landscape. She meets people of both German and Polish descent, who, after the war’s end, were forced to leave their homes, or who remained in what became a new country. She encounters shadows of the past: monuments, dioramas, the ruins of Nazi architecture. In a dinosaur park, paleontologists dig for the bones of a prehistoric creature, the one they call the grandfather of dinosaurs. Again and again, there is the presence of water—in the floods that swept fossils from one place to another and in fear-inflected metaphors: waves of Slavs or refugees. Where do the monsters of the past lurk? Fact and fiction interweave into a fantastic tapestry, as the process of genealogical research begins to go off course. Layer by layer, traces of migration routes are uncovered, and the roots of racial ideology are shaken loose from the ground— because almost nothing originally comes from the place where it’s found.

Juliane Henrich studied writing, art and film in Leipzig, Berlin, and Jerusalem with Thomas Arslan, Heinz Emigholz, and Avi Mograbi among others. In 2012, she graduated with honors from the University of the Arts Berlin. Her work often deals with the ways in which the definitions of places change. Her films and video installations have been shown at international film festivals and art exhibitions, including the Berlinale, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Duisburg Documentary Film Week, DOK Leipzig, ZKM Karlsruhe, Visions du Réel in Nyon, the Images Festival in Toronto, and at various Goethe Institutes. The Goethe Institute Buenos Aires and DocBuenosAires featured her work in a mono­graphic show. In 2018, she was an artist in residence at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles. Her films are distributed by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin.