Despite his failing eyesight, Gerd Roscher (82) still gets in his car every day to drive his wife to the school where she teaches. As a filmmaker, he once traveled the world, but now he spends his days in parking lots and supermarkets, making phone calls, drinking coffee, meeting Bolivian panpipe players, and waiting for his wife. This smaller world does nothing to curb his imagination: he thinks about Romantic landscape painters and still has plans for a film about Monika Ertl, the woman who avenged Che Guevara.
Director Philipp Hartmann, a friend of Roscher’s, gives the portrait a form that is as dry as it is unconventional. Grainy black-and-white footage shot on environmentally friendly 16mm film that he processed himself is combined with color iPhone footage that might have been made by Roscher himself. Winner of the award for best short film at FIDMarseille.
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