Photo: Locarno Festival/Marco Abram
Already in one of his earlier films, "All Still Orbit", a lake was at the centre of the action. After that, Dane Komljen never let go of the subject. By chance he came across the 'father of modern limnology' during his research. We are talking about G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the water ecologist who conducted research at Yale University in the USA between 1928 and 1971. During a visit to the Yale archive, Komljen delved into Hutchinson's notes and photographs and also came across his four-volume standard work "A Treatise on Limnology", published in 1957. In it he explains, among other things, that man perceives lakes as unchangeable landscape elements, although they are in constant change and even cease to exist at some point because they silt up. These remarks fascinated Komljen so much that he gave his film project the working title "A Treatise on Limnology".
The experimental feature film therefore aims to illuminate the life situations of several protagonists on different temporal levels around the theme of transformation, whereby their stories always have something to do with lakes. The director Dane Komljen, the camerawoman Jenny Lou Ziegel and the producer Zsuzsanna Kiràly have already worked together on "fantasy sentences" and will now also realize this project together. Apart from Stechlinsee, the film will also be shot at Lago de Sanabria in Spain. The small crew wants to work carefully, only with minimal equipment and without artificial light in the nature, in order to capture the special atmosphere of the locations unadulterated. The film is supported by the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and the Jeonju Cinema Project and co-produced in Spain by Andergraun Films.
The filmmakers will be Artists in Residence for the shooting of Stechlinsee. During her first research visit to Stechlinsee, she was impressed by the fact that the term 'limnology' is not an unfamiliar foreign word, but on everyone's lips. For when the filmmakers asked about the way to the research institute, the expert question immediately came up: "You probably mean limnology?"
To the persons:
Dane Komljen studied directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Serbia and at the art school Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. His films have been shown at major national and international festivals - including Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam, Marseille, Sarajevo, Toronto and New York - and have repeatedly won Awards.
Jenny Lou Ziegel studied at the DFFB - Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin and has been working as a freelance camerawoman in the fields of feature, documentary and art film since graduating in 2012.
Zsuzsanna Kiràly has worked in cultural PR and for various film festivals before specializing in script development in film production. With Flaneur Films she founded her own production company.