大象传媒

Clocking in it an imposing 680 minutes and divided into six self-contained episodes, this is the third cycle in writer/director Edgar Reitz's colossal chronicle of 20th-century German life. Spanning the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the Millennium celebrations, Heimat 3 : A Chronicle Of Endings And Beginnings revisits the rural Hunsr眉ck region of the original Heimat series, to explore how the tide of recent history - the departure of NATO troops, immigration from Russia, global economic trends - impacts upon everyday lives and identities.

The pivotal individuals here are familiar figures from the previous episode Heimat 2: the conductor/composer Hermann (Henry Arnold) and the singer Clarissa (Salome Klammer), who return as a giddily happy couple to the Rhineland countryside. The film's novelistic range incorporates the experiences of their parents and siblings (particularly Hermann's older brothers Anton and Ernst), their own adult children, and also the East German workmen they hire to renovate their dream home outside the village of Schabbach.

"A POWERFUL SENSE OF MELANCHOLY AND DISAPPOINTMENT"

The mood of jubilation surrounding national reunification, which reaches its peak with Germany winning the World Cup in 1990, gives way to a powerful sense of melancholy and disappointment. Ageing characters become preoccupied with their own mortality, and nature itself - in the form of tremors and floods - heightens the mood of human vulnerability. Guided by an urgent score and shot with considerable visual flair, it's another impressive feat of multi-stranded cinematic storytelling from Reitz, whilst the foreboding final shot paves the way for Heimat 4.

In German with English subtitles.