This 15-1/2 hour, 11-part film will be presented over two days, as follows: SaturdayEpisodes 1-3 1:00 Dinner Break Episodes 4-7 7:00 SundayEpisodes 8-9 1:00 Dinner Break Episodes 10-11 7:00 Note: Heimat will be presented again on January 18 and 19 in the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco. "Heimat: home, native place or country, homeland" (Cassell's New German Dictionary). "'Heimat' is the distant and yet familiar world in which memories and their images in the mind's eye are one" (Edgar Reitz). "Everyone has a second 'Heimat' in which all one does is innocent" (Robert Musil). Heimat, the film--or rather, at 15-1/2 hours, the film experience--was an unqualified hit with critics at recent film festivals in Venice and London, not to mention some ten million German viewers who saw the extraordinary chronicle in theaters and on t.v. British critic Derek Malcolm has pronounced it "a masterwork of the New German Cinema, and something of a watershed in European cinema." It is the saga of a fictional Rhineland village called Schabbach, between the years 1919 and 1982. Schabbach, it is thought by certain villagers in the film, is the center of the known world ("if you draw a line from the North Pole to the South Pole, it goes right through Schabbach," they explain); for purposes of his film project, director Edgar Reitz has accepted just this premise. He, and we, view the tumultuous events of some sixty years of German history through the eyes of these rural townspeople, and this is both the unique beauty, and often, the disturbing claustrophobia, of Heimat. The project grew out of Edgar Reitz's desire to help restore a sense of recent German history, not to the world, but to the Germans themselves. For them, 1945 was "zero hour"; guilt over the mass participation in the Third Reich led to four decades of hushed mouths and squelched memories for those who lived these years, and a significant gap in history for their children. "We Germans have had a hard time with our stories. Even now, forty years after the war, we are still suffering from culture shock," Reitz says. "Our film, Heimat, consists of these suppressed or forgotten little stories." The stories revolve around the many-branched Simon family, and more specifically, around Maria Simon, wife of young Paul Simon who, at the film's opening, brings the Great War home to his family kitchen, where he sits swatting flies, still stunned from the trenches. Paul eventually takes a walk, all the way to America, but Maria stays...and stays, becoming the greying matriarch of a family of grown boys. Hers is a remarkable role, in which the thirty-year-old actress Marita Breuer seems to grow and age and deepen with the "years." But she is one among twenty-eight major characters whose story this is--too many characters with too many quirks and sundry links to the vicissitudes of German history and economics, to delineate here. They are the stuff of Heimat, and after two actual days and sixty screen years in their company, you may agree with the critic who wrote that "Reitz and company have created a village that does not stop being real for a single second." Inventively shot in sepia, black-and-white, and color, Heimat is filled with telling detail, much of it supplied or suggested by the eager, real-life townspeople who lived with the location filming for over two years (and many of whom act in the film). In the poetic opening sequence, a Breughel-like canvas unfolds in which villagers enter the Simon kitchen one by one, to greet the shell-shocked Paul. Here we are introduced to the local obsessions--one woman's concern for Gypsies under the bed, another's rampant superstitions, a rural presence of dirt and manure that is alternately comical and unsettling. As Heimat unfolds its many moods, from bucolic to ironic, it becomes clear that Reitz is not in town to cast blame, but only to "take a close look." His Heimat is a distinctly German one, and even so, may not be that of many Germans and others for whom Robert Musil's innocent "second Heimat" can never exist. We invite you to experience one man's Heimat and form your own conclusions.