THEILMANN (2023)

in this country everything becomes marching music / in this language everything ultimately becomes untrue / even silence

One weekend in the spring of 1990. Bernhard Theilmann has been commissioned to record some of his poems for public radio station Deutschlandfunk. In them, he reflects on the end of the GDR, his existence as an entrepreneur in the semi-legal print shop “Obergrabenpresse,” and predicts the future. Over the next nearly 30 years, he will found the city magazine SAX in Dresden, cause journalistic controversy and watch as the “Florence on the Elbe” becomes more than ever a city of backdrops and props. He will travel to Asia and South America, lose all his poems from the nineties in a computer crash, and be unable to prevent the slow demise of the printing workshop he co-founded. 

(Documentary, Short, 20 min)