Hanne Lassl

It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.

Ecological interdependence, co-creation, resilience and collaboration in nature – these are the topics dealt with in this documentary film, viewed against the backdrop of our increasingly threatened environment. Beyond the poles of nostalgia and techno-futurism, the film’s impressive images provide an insight into natural processes and systems. Dead forest in Central Europe is becoming living forest again. Floating beds in Bangladesh are taking on climate change. In the dunes of China’s desert regions, thousands of people are working on the largest renaturalisation project in the world. In the Danube Delta between Romania and Ukraine, old dams from the Soviet era are being dismantled so that a European wetland can once again become a biodiverse natural landscape. Nature as a role model and a potential game changer for future-oriented, innovative adaptation strategies? This film highlights some successful approaches to tackling our current ecological challenges.

After growing up as a girl and being celebrated as a women's downhill skiing champion, Erika Schinegger's career came to an abrupt end in 1967 after a sex test. Against the wishes of her family and the national skiing association, Erik started learning to be a man at the age of 20.