Director's Portrait:

Documentary filmmaker Andres Veiel maintains that he is most interested in open wounds. That does not necessarily mean much. In an age when every kind of human suffering, sorrow and failure is cynically exploited, any TV show greedy for scandal, blood and tears could claim the same. But Veiel's interest in open wounds is quite different. Not only does he attempt, by means of long conversations and a persistent search for the right image, to penetrate beyond the first and most obvious description of a wound. He also - by means of suggestive but not manipulative montage - dares to convey his own view of things, which goes far beyond the presentation of whatever facts he has found out in the course of his research. He aims to employ research as more than a clip to stretch open a wound, making more and more of it visible. His films are conceived as possible reconciliation and healing on the basis of open, public discourse.

Veiel succeeds in breaking through to what has not been told previously, he sets thought processes in motion for both viewers and protagonists, but there is always a price to pay for these achievements. Not only research for new films, burrowing into other people's lives, represents a strain for this director. Veiel's older films never let go of him, either. He doesn't just shoot his works, he adopts themes. Or rather, they adopt him. Today he still receives invitations to screenings of his old films, and to debates and conferences on topics which he has investigated.

One example is Veiel's film The Survivors, a very personal piece of research which was released in the cinemas in 1996. Three schoolmates from his graduation year 1979 committed suicide, and Veiel set out to discover the reasons, to find out whether these deaths resulted from private collapse or whether the problem concerned his entire generation. Even today, Veiel is often invited to attend debates addressing the problem of suicide.

This underlines the quality of his works. It indicates their power, which also stems from the fact that Veiel does not want to give all the answers, to explain everything, to make every aspect clear and unambiguous. «It is not a matter of developing a clear, linear, stringent picture with no contradictions,» he said of his most explosive film to date, Black Box BRD. «However, it does mean having the courage to leave empty spaces, and not always wanting to establish the vector from A to B. I want to use the evidence to consider people from all sides and thus leave some space for the viewer's own projections as well.»

But the welcome long-term echo of his films also creates problems for Veiel. He has to make sure that he does not interrupt the work on new projects too often and for too long. The market is impatient and wants new films quickly, while a name still reverberates in the audience's memory. But Veiel's method is careful, thorough work that subjects his initial judgments to repeated scrutiny. It is no coincidence that his current project, Die Spielenden, is a long-term observation of a group of young people training to be actors. This film will also concern parents and children, each generation's expectations of the other, the discrepancy between different plans for life - one of Veiel's great themes.

Again and again, his films succeed in making social analyses by telling individual stories. They document a spirit of the times, they dissect the conflicts of an era as if in a chemical process. Yet they do not become abstract, they do not turn away from life and towards dry theory. With their very pragmatic understanding of the mingling of family conflicts and ideological fronts, they retain an intimate character despite their politically explosive content and their social horizon. Veiel knows that in this way his works are often a pointer to his own person. He subjects himself to the interpretation of audiences and critics, and he works out his own problems and conflicts in his stories of generations, his way of following up other lives led in conformity, opposition or even running amok. In his films, Veiel wants to make permeable the boundaries between thinking and feeling, the political and the private, insight gained and emotional shock. It is only fitting, therefore, that he also abolishes the boundary between the viewer and the viewed.