Despite his young career, filmmaker Conrad Winkler is not a blank slate. He once moved to Trotha for his documentary film “Stadtrand”. The film was awarded at the Leipzig Short Film Festival ‘Kurzsucht’ and also ran in the MDR’s program. For his graduation film, the documentary film student at the renowned University of Television and Film in Munich went back to the outskirts of the city – to Halle-Neustadt. You can find out what the native of Halle is up to and why a picnic along the way triggered his initial spark for his film idea here.
Your own thesis is often a seemingly insurmountable challenge for students, one that you prefer to postpone. However, Conrad Winkler has no pages to fill up for his graduation, but an evening program. Last year, Winkler moved to Halle-Neustadt as part of his research, before that he had hardly any points of contact with the district and only knew Haneu from swimming lessons.
The interest in the place was there, but he didn’t have a concrete idea. Neustadt is charged with polarizing images for Winkler – between socialism and social hotspots. And so Winkler got his first doubts about his own project. A random observation triggered the decisive impetus last summer in the Südpark in his. Some children have a picnic on a narrow strip of green in front of their house, no adults far and wide: a moment of lightness and naturalness. Winkler sees this as a bridge to the beginnings when Halle-Neustadt was a young and child-rich city. ‘Somehow the emotional access through this picture was there at the beginning and I thought it makes a lot of sense to look at children in Neustadt,’ says Winkler, ‘how are you currently experiencing the district and what are you making of it?’
The material was found for a film that he would also like to see in the cinema – a good omen for the filmmaker for a promising project. In order to find the protagonists for his film, Winkler sat in on various children and youth facilities and spent a lot of time there, tackled, helped, implemented radio and film projects with the children and also ran his casting. And watching the children closely: who has a special charisma, with whom a bond can be built? Winkler finally won four children for his film: two girls and two boys – four nationalities. Working with children is inspiring for Winkler, but also challenging. Children are much more open-minded, but the work is characterized by spontaneity, it can be planned less, you have to get involved – to the moment and the personality of the child. Convincing work, on the other hand, was particularly necessary for the parents to build trust and to make one’s own project and the special features of the documentary film comprehensible. After all, Winkler wants to accompany the families over a long period of time. It is important to get to know each other, to make your own work transparent and to introduce the families to the setting with the camera.
In the second half of the year, the shooting will start. 20 days of shooting are scheduled for this, which are chosen flexibly, after all Winkler wants to capture natural scenes from the children’s everyday life. However, small food for thought or tasks with which Winkler wants to guide the children in order to create an examination of the place and which at the same time show the respective talents of the children are also conceivable. In this way, children’s drawings can be animated using AI or individual sound recordings can be compressed into a scenic sound collage. Whether these ideas will then be fruitful can only be assessed in the shooting process and at the latest on average. ‘Special film is dictatorship, documentary film is more democracy,’ says Winkler. Documentary film is a joint effort that develops dialogically from the process, it is a give and take. But what do Winkler’s protagonists take away from his film?
Halle-Neustadt is a popular material for media projects – a constant coming and going. A report by Stern-TV about Halle-Neustadt reached an audience of millions last year. The one-dimensional image that draws the documentary of Haneu gets caught in the minds of the people – even those who live here. However, Winkler’s work will not be an image film about the district. He wants to name the problems, but also not depict stereotypes or downsize crime statistics. Winkler not only wants to tell about, but from Halle-Neustadt and show that there are real people behind his protagonists. ‘Halle-Neustadt is a habitat and not a hotspot,’ says Winkler. With his film he will not be able to change the thinking of cinema-goers – that would be idealistic. But he wants to carry the film into the children’s lives and arouse interest in telling his own story. In doing so, he hopes to at least create an approach to his own perception, not only for the children who appear in his film, but for everyone who recognizes themselves in them.