Although we learn certain things about them through the film, could you tell me more about the central couple and what led you to want to make a film about them?
Gerd Roscher is a close friend, a filmmaker, and he was also my film professor at art school twenty years ago. His wife, Tanja, works as an art teacher at a secondary school. Because of an illness, she uses a wheelchair, and Gerd drives her to work every day. As he is gradually losing his eyesight, he prefers not to drive back home on his own, so he spends much of the day waiting for her in a nearby commercial area—between supermarkets, chain stores, and all the facilities typically found in such a “non-place.”
Gerd’s way of relating to this environment is quite similar to my own approach to film-making. While he spends his time there quite pragmatically—having a coffee, eating lunch, talking to people—he is also constantly observing what happens around him and reflecting on its sociological and philosophical dimensions. Marc Augé’s book on non-places was important to him when it was first published, and here he finds a kind of materialisation of those ideas.
At the same time, while physically confined to this highly functional space, he is mentally travelling elsewhere, reflecting, for example, on his as-yet-unrealised film project about no-man’s-lands—territories between national borders that are not fully regulated or defined, but instead remain open to imagination and new possibilities.
I would venture to say that this is a road movie, even if travel itself is drastically constrained.
Yes, it is definitely a kind of road movie, even though the protagonist is largely confined to a place that seems to have no individual character, no soul of its own. Perhaps it is precisely this condition of being stuck that allows him to explore it in a way that resembles a road movie.
I often think of film-making itself as a journey. When we travel, we tend to look at things more carefully, with greater patience and curiosity. We become attentive to differences, to details that might otherwise remain invisible within our everyday surroundings, and relate them to our experiences. In that sense, the road movie is less a genre for me than a method—a way of using cinema as a form of research or exploration of new perspectives.
Despite its purely functional and commercial purpose, this non-place reveals itself to be inhabited in ways that contradict its design. It is meant to be a place of transit, somewhere people pass through in order to shop. Yet many people use it differently: they sit in the sun on the benches, language-school students spend their breaks smoking between parked cars, and others come there every day simply to have lunch among other people. Especially on Thursdays, when a regional speciality is served! According to Gerd’s sociological reading, this dish is almost as devoid of distinctive qualities as the commercial service area itself, or the flat and seemingly unspectacular landscape of northern Germany that surrounds it. Yet it still provides people with a sense of regional identity and belonging.
Early in the film, while driving, Gerd offers a memorable reflection on the Romantic concept of landscape. How does that reflection relate to the predominant landscape of the film—that of the commercial service area?
I think everyone can relate this question to their own experience. But landscape is certainly an important theme in the film, as its title already suggests.
The idea of landscape—and, more broadly, our concept of nature—is something that has interested me for a long time, as have the ways cinema engages with these questions. My previous feature, Instead of Trees (2024), was also concerned with such issues. What constitutes a landscape? What do we perceive as nature, and what do we project onto it? What determines its absence on the B-side of the landscape?
In that sense, it was a gift to the film that Gerd and Tanja happened to discuss Romantic painting while driving. Even more striking, however, is the resonance between certain visual strategies of Romanticism—such as obscuring or displacing the centre of the image—and Gerd’s deteriorating eyesight, which becomes a very physical experience of seeing.
The moving way in which the couple support one another opens the film to another tonal register, one that we might also describe as romantic. Would you agree that this is, among other things, a love story?
I am not sure I would describe it as openly sentimental. For me, the romantic dimension is more of an underlying tone that runs through the film.
It is present both in their relationship and the overall constellation, as well as in the way Gerd relates to the place in the film and to the people he encounters and observes there. I tried to adopt a similar perspective in how I depicted the place through my camera.
The alternation between black-and-white and colour, and between photochemical film and video, does not seem arbitrary. Could you comment on the way these different media structure the film?
The initial idea behind the black-and-white 16mm footage was to create a contrast with the clean, highly organised appearance of this commercial non-place—a space that lacks distinctive features and could look almost identical anywhere in the world.
I shot these sequences on expired analogue film and processed them by hand in a bucket, using ecological substances such as coffee or red wine instead of conventional chemical developers. Through this process, I was searching for imperfections, accidents and traces of chance—the scratches, stains and irregularities that emerge on the film as visible signs of manual labour, as something singular and unpredictable. In a way, they become a form of resistance against the rational and capitalist logic that structures the place itself.
The colour images operate differently. Shot on an iPhone, they have a distinctly wide-angle, smartphone aesthetic and an almost aggressively clean, polished palette. They portray the colourful world of consumer goods and commercial display—and also reveal the melancholy and dreariness that underlie this environment.
In the editing, I used this iPhone layer as something that could be Gerd’s perspective. He could be using his iPhone as a visual aid, filming and then amplifying things in order to recognise them.
And finally, there are some analogue colour images that constitute a dream sequence, with a different kind of colour palette and an analogue, dreamy visual effect.
I understand that the peacock simply happened to be there, but that does not make its appearance any less memorable. Is there anything you would like to tell us about the presence of that peacock in the film?
Gerd and Tanja live in the middle of a forest and they live there together with a lot of animals. Some are endemic to northern Germany, like sheep and the roosters you can also hear in the film, and some are not, like the peacocks.
The white one was an especially faithful companion. Sadly, he passed away recently. But in the film he is still there as part of that landscape that Gerd and Tanja live in. As something like the guardian of the A-side of the landscape.
Could you tell me a bit more about Gerd’s films?
In a way, most of the films Gerd Roscher made throughout his life are road movies, or films created in the course of travelling, in which he tries to understand something through a journey. He often retraces the journeys of other people—for example, Antonin Artaud’s trip to the Tarahumara in Mexico in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin’s final journey across the Pyrenees, or the expedition of the German explorer Albrecht Roscher, who travelled alone through several African countries in the nineteenth century in search of the source of the Nile.
In these films, I would say, Gerd brings together the views and quests of his protagonists with his own interest in them, as well as in the historical and contemporary conditions and constellations that surround their stories. This also includes his own position as a filmmaker searching for new forms of expression.
What I find particularly impressive is that, in several of his films, he literally retraced the historical itineraries of his protagonists multiple times, always travelling alone and often on foot. It was a highly physical form of research—not only into places and stories, but also into the experience of movement itself, usually under very demanding conditions.
The protagonists whose journeys he followed all ultimately failed: Artaud descended into madness, Benjamin took his own life, and Albrecht Roscher was assassinated at the age of only twenty-three. In contrast, at eighty-three, Gerd, although confined to his car parked in a commercial area in the film, continues to plan and imagine new projects in distant places. While stuck in a non-place, he reflects on cinematic journeys to utopian no-man’s-lands.
Interviewed by Manuel Asín
