Mike Stubbs, GB
"Gift - the pilot"
D/GB 1995, Video, 3 min, col
In 1995, first year of EMARE, Mike Stubbs produced a three-minute video in Werkleitz, which portrays the industrial landscape of Saxony-Anhalt in spectacular images. Mike Stubbs submitted the video to a competition of the BBC, on which it was possible to produce the 15-minute film version Gift for BBC2 in 1996. Gift - the pilot will be screened on the opening night of real[work] to give the visitors an impression of this (formerly) heavily industrialised region.
Gift is a music film shot in the Wolfen-Bitterfeld district of East Germany, where composer Ulf Langheinrich was born. The area is notorious for its astonishing lunar-like landscape, a product of uncurbed open cast mining and chemical production. Although much of the devastation belongs to a past era of massive state industry some coal mining continues using vast mechanical diggers, some over fifty years old. The sounds of these industries are the basis for Langheinrich's hypnotic electronic score while their images are reconstructed into a electrifying impression of a dislocated landscape and community.
(MetaMedia Productions Ltd. 1996)