Gift

Gift is a music film shot in the Wolfen-Bitterfeld district of East Germany where composer Ulf Langheinrich was born. The area is notorious for its astonishing lunar-like landscape, a product of uncurbed open cast mining and chemical production. Although much of the devastation belongs to a past era of massive state industry some coal mining continues using vast mechanical diggers made before the Second World War. The sounds of these industries are the basis for Langheinrich’s hypnotic electronic score while their images are reconstructed into a electrifying impression of a dislocated landscape and community.