Official Selection, Chicago Underground Film Festival 2014
My brief encounter with Berlin's abandoned Spree Park, and subsequent attempt to create a film on the subject, sparked a strange series of introspective tangents, which eventually became the subject matter for this film essay. Kulturpark is a meditation on memory and history; a film whose contents also serve as the process that informed its creation.
Essay film; Approx. 20 mins
Super 8mm film and Digital Video
Shot in Berlin, Germany
Edited in Chicago, Illinois
2012-2013
“KULTURPARK (Greg Reigh, 2013, 20 min)...is a multilayered and intricate meditation on the connections between geography, memory, and personal identity. Beginning as a simple exploration of the semi-abandoned Spree Park in Berlin, Reigh’s movie turns into a deeply self-reflexive experiment, incorporating its own means of production and images from Reigh’s early, unremembered childhood in its discussion of the hidden residues of history forgotten within our cities, our lives. Deeply moving and vulnerable, the movie’s melancholic attempts to recapture lost moments and people lost to time thickly coalesce on to one another, until the rotting, broken detritus of the park is unmistakable as physical manifestations of a way of life forever just out of the reach of recollection.”
