“I am an old tidal outlet at whose end a village is situated. My story was ground to dust by water and sand.” Can a tidal outlet – a canal connecting the North Sea and the harbour – speak? This question caused quite a stir in 1962 and led some people to reject this film, in which a landscape and its inhabitants are not described from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, but from that of a tidal outlet. Pictures of a deserted beach, a drive through the village, decaying walls, portraits of people. Pure poetry. “I am as tired as the tarred houses.”
– Grit Lemke

The life of children in the Bernese Uplands in essays and simple observations composed and read by them. This film was made in only four days in collaboration with the children and their teacher (“Our teacher is a beautiful lady.”). Going to school in the snow, the classroom with its stove in which a child lights the fire, writing on slates, scrubbed school desks, the children’s drawings. This view of the mountain farmers’ hard life only appears to be naive: in its concentration on essentials, details which may only be visible to a child’s eye, reality seems almost magically transported.
– Grit Lemke

The period from 1965 to 75, during which this film was presented at this festival, was called the “Vietnam decade” in Leipzig. “Documentarians” and photographers were the first to spotlight the horrors of a war which initially took place far from the eyes of the world. The two genres merged beautifully in the persons of Nestler and the renowned East German photographer Thomas Billhardt: Billhardt’s photos of the life of a tortured nation, but also of moments of respite and happiness, which sometimes – and this is where he is very close to Nestler – focus on the smallest details, burn themselves into the viewer’s memory. Cleverly edited, with a sober voice-over by Zsóka Nestler, contrasted with poems by Vietnamese children read by Swedish children – the only moving images.
– Grit Lemke

This feature was produced for a Swedish Public Television youth magazine as a simple and easy-to-follow explanation of the background of the military coup in Chile. In the typical Nestler style, the film uses historical documents, drawings and photos (including some by Thomas Billhardt) to trace an arc from the Indian struggle for liberation to Allende and his fall. Notwithstanding its ostentatious factuality it is a passionate plea for the cause of the Unidad Popular: “There’s a connection between the fact that many are so terribly poor and so many are rich.” The film was never broadcast.
– Grit Lemke

In the archives of Swedish Public Television, Peter Nestler came across photos of a mining disaster in Lower Silesia that killed 155 miners in 1930. In only six minutes, the portrayals of the people waiting above ground, the desperate relatives and helpers, the memorial ceremony and the German Communist Party’s protests as well as the pictures of miners’ work at the time, combined with quotes from Swedish newspapers and sombre music by Weber and Grieg, outline a society that will literally walk over dead bodies to make a profit.
– Grit Lemke

Nine years after the military coup, Peter Nestler comes to a country that seems to have gone back to normal. But behind the images of wealth and urbanity he discovers the fault lines of the past: traumatised families, children who were forced to watch as their parents were arrested and tortured. Broken people who make their painstaking way back to a normal life. Oppression is also presented in its psychological form as a process of suppressing grief, anger and memories that makes a whole society sick.
– Grit Lemke

A poem by Hans Sachs narrated in single frames of charcoal drawings by Peter Nestler: the rabbits team up against the hunter, a parable on the possibility of resistance.
– Grit Lemke

It’s the workers, their daily life, culture, hard work at the steel mill and above all their self-help organisations that Nestler is interested in and describes in loving detail. A world of the underprivileged, whose solidarity, far from any social romanticism, still makes it appear alive and strong. A picture that the SDR disapproved of. When Peter Nestler, after long discussions, refused to add an explanatory “neutral voice-over”, the film was finally broadcast under the title “Menschen in Sheffield” (People in Sheffield), which effectively eliminated the workers from the title, and the co-operation with Nestler was terminated once and for all.
– Grit Lemke

Modern buildings, backyards, small grocery stores, pub goers, card players, people taking a stroll, the charm of faded bourgeois mansions and the suburbs of the industry: factory grounds, chimneys and cranes, the shabby houses of the workers, the harbour, ships on the river Ruhr, a child in the street. This portrait of a city with its unique score of Dieter Süverkrüp’s jazzy, sometimes dissonant guitar, a Jew’s harp and the driving beat of the metronome was not very popular with politicians and the media: too ugly, too grey. It was to take almost twenty years (when the Mülheim depicted in the film had largely disappeared) before the Rheinische Post newspaper stated: “simply sensational.”
– Grit Lemke

Instead of looking at the romantic river Rhine, merry with wine-making and -drinking, the film focuses on the hard work of the people linked to the river: the wine growers on the slopes, the boatmen with their “clear head and firm hands” and the barmaid behind the counter where the workers drink. Text and visuals reveal a respect for the people who make it possible to enjoy drinking wine in the first place – scenes of which serve as contrast here – and are paid badly for their labours.
– Grit Lemke

Using almost exclusively historic photos, Peter Nestler embarks on a quest into the history of his own family and one of the darkest chapters of European history. Count Erik von Rosen, Nestler’s grandfather, was an explorer in Africa, a discoverer, photographer, collector of ethnographics, and – a high-ranking Nazi. The trail takes him from the genocide of ten million people in the Congo straight to the Holocaust. The horror lurks in the proud, colonial gestures of the carefully arranged photos.
– Grit Lemke

“A courageous film by a courageous filmmaker” (Viennale 2009)

The first part of this film is devoted to the Greek resistance against fascism and the civil war for independence. While the voice-over recites facts and names, photos take us into the past and the everyday lives of the people. The second part takes us to Greece in 1965, where the masses are protesting against the removal of the liberal Georgios Papandreou. – Two years later the military junta seized power in Greece. When Filmecho/Filmwoche called the film “communist”, it was doomed. It was rarely shown and originated the stigma that ultimately made it impossible for Peter Nestler to continue to work in Germany.
– Grit Lemke

Seven Hungarian workers and farmers who began to paint or make sculptures at an advanced age present their works. Contemporary history, tragic and traumatic experiences are revealed, a century and a human life snatched from oblivion in a painting (which would be termed “naive” by most) or a wooden sculpture.
“The film is called ‘Time’ because there is so much of the way the past shifts and becomes homogenised in it.” (Peter Nestler in a conversation with Christoph Hübner)
– Grit Lemke

Roma talk about their experiences in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany, inspired by Otto Pankok’s paintings of Roma in the 1930s. These are moving narratives of persecution, discrimination, marginalisation, of life as second-class human beings, all of which lasts, incredibly enough, right up to the allegedly democratic present day of the film, since they live in inhumane conditions in barracks at the margins of cities and society and are not officially recognised as Nazi victims. Long, nearly uncut sequences open up space for the people and their stories. That’s all it takes.
– Grit Lemke