A soft skylight caresses the white walls of the small lobby. Snuggled in his armchair, an open newspaper on his belly, Mr Poirel feigns to sleep without missing a second of what his old friend the mirror has to tell him. Above all, don´t go attracted attention ! The half-light of the living is to his advantage. Three months of patience will finally bear fruits. It´s painful, but the reflection doesn´t lie. The flowers in his friends Richard hands are real and so is the smile on the lips of his wife.
Manuel Heidenreich is trained as an architect. His studies and especially, his Erasmus year in Budapest, gave him the possibility to experiment working with light, space, time, the human body and storytelling of ordinariness. During a trip to Turkey, while reading a book on a roof terrace, he became witness of an incident which could seem insignificant at first sight. Through a small window, Manuel could just see the red underpants from Monsieur and a little skin above and underneath while Madam tries to catch his attention by showing him her most beautiful dresses in front of the Bosporus on the terrace. Pointless. She just gets his ignorance. At this moment, Manuel asked himself, what was the value of the most beautiful architecture without life, stories and feelings sheltered by it. He decided to focus on all these small and big stories in his work and to build with human life instead of concrete. The decision to shot movies was born. Manuel shots his first short-movies and watches up to 400 feature films a year during his last studying years. He is multiplying his experiences by involving himself in several NGOs in France and Germany. Among others, in “aye aye vo” which organizes every year the Internationale Film Festival Nancy Lorraine, in “Black dog ev” with whom he participated as a cameraman in a documentary film about surviving victims of World War two in Poland, Russia and Ukrain and in “Human pictures ev”, a youtube like internet platform for social engaged movies. He travels a lot with and without camera, alone, in small groups as well as bigger ones, by train, hitchhiking or with his old vw van. But always with his eyes wide open, a notebook in his hands and looking for the accidental meetings, stories, characters and the small things that make out of our planet what it is. |
His film-projects become more and more ambitious and mastery. On each of them he experiments a different aspect of Cinema. How light can intensify a story ? How camera and actor movements can create a tension between the characters without taking the shortcut through dialog ? Which degree of improvisation is suitable in directing ?
Now he reached a point where importance of the final result and room for experimentation are reversed. He holds enough tools in his hands to insure the quality of all the aspects of a movie. Let´s wait and see what his next movie will look like.
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