New German Cinema

I wrote in my first report from Venice that no matter how much critics grumbled about a poor festival, someone was bound to find an unexpected masterwork hidden in the programme.

This is exactly what has happened this year after many disappointments. Except that the masterwork concerned – Edgar Reitz’s HEIMAT (Homeland) – has been discovered by almost everybody (…) I have still not seen all of this extraordinary epic about the fictional village of Schabbach in Hunsrück between 1919 and 1982. But I have certainly seen enough to know that Homeland is not only one of the finest jewels in the crown of the New German Cinema but also something of a watershed in European cinema.

Derek Malcolm in: THE GUARDIAN, 6.September 1984