In her first feature length documentary as a director, author and curator Grit Lemke turns her attention to the life of the cult rock poet and coal excavator driver Gerhard Gundermann who was initially called "the Bob Dylan of the opencast mine" before becoming the "voice of the East Germans". The film biography is told against the background of a region where global issues of our time are focused as if in a concave mirror. They permeate the artist's oeuvre: home and devastation, the end of industry and work, utopia and individual responsibility. Observations and conversations, images of a post-mining landscape, and a first-person narrator from the coal region enter into a dialogue with Gundermann through his songs, texts and largely unknown archive footage.

Gundermann Revier

A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.