Schanze, Jens. Otzenrath 3° kälter [Strange Homeland]. Munich: Mascha Film, 2007. Super 16 mm, 81 min.
Otzenrath, a seven-hundred-year-old village near Düsseldorf in North-Rhine Westphalia, is the first of thirteen residential areas that will have relocated by 2045 in order to allow the open-pit, brown coal mine Garzweiler II to reach its full size of 48 square km. Director Jens Schanze examines the effects that this has on residents during a ten-month period beginning shortly after their relocation to new homes in “Neu-Otzenrath.” This is the sequel to Otzenrather Sprung [Waste Land], in which Schanze first chronicled the plight of residents, some 2600 in total, as the relocation process commenced in the year 2000. The coal, in powering one of the twenty five coal-fuelled power plants planned or under construction in Germany during the first decade of the twentieth century, will create several million tons of carbon emissions each year. This, in addition to those created by a total of over one thousand new coal-powered plants expected to have gone into service worldwide by 2012. (Source: Adapted from the Original Film Website)
© 2007 Mascha Film, Judith Malek-Mahdavi and Jens Schanze. Film stills used with permission.
