Subject: Filmmaking

In 1968, a classroom in a girls’ high school in Munich is transformed into a film studio under the direction of the young Edgar Reitz. The film lesson begins: the first documented attempt in cinema history to teach film aesthetics as a stand-alone subject. In 2023, Edgar Reitz, now world-famous as the director of the film epic Heimat, is approached by an elderly woman who identifies herself as one of his pupils from 1968. The two arrange a class reunion. Compiled from a documentary made about the project at the time, the Super 8 films shot by the pupils and the filmed reunion in 2023, a kind of long exposure of the last 55 years of film history is created. Are the personalities of the pupils already evident in the exercise films? And what do the women have to say now about contemporary film culture? Filmstunde_23 is a declaration of love for filmmaking. (Berlinale)