The Sun Island (Germany 2017, 89 min; strandfilm/ZDF, dir: Thomas Elsaesser)

General Description The Sun Island is an essay film about coincidences, shattered lives and posthumous fame. A found footage family film about love and passion, friendship and heartbreak set in Frankfurt and Berlin between the wars (1927-1935), during WWII and into the present. It includes the history of the Frankfurt Großmarkhalle – a landmark building of the International Style – before and after its acquisition by the European Central Bank, as part of its new headquarters. But The Sun Island is also a film about the origins of the green movement: about recycling, sustainability, and living off the grid – before these ideas had been properly invented. The Sun Island documents the life and professional career of Martin Elsaesser (1884-1957), architect and chief city planner in Frankfurt (Germany) from 1925 to 1932. The controversial acquisition of the Frankfurt Central Market by the European Central Bank is the ostensible occasion to weave the building's turbulent history into Martin Elsaesser's biography, his wife Liesel’s liaison with notable landscape architect Leberecht Migge, and the director’s own family history. The films draws on a unique collection of home movies, photographs and letters, as well as contemporary interviews to document and dramatize a life-changing episode in the family histories of two all but forgotten German pioneer architects – one designer of churches and markets, the other inventor of urban gardening schemes – during the crucial years between the Weimar Republic and WW II.

Viewer Comments: "I am writing to you after seeing your film The Sun Island and having the pleasure to exchange a few words with you about the amazing strength and vividness of the women of your family. However, as the film itself turned out to be rather haunting, some other thoughts concerning "The Sun Island" came to me. What seems most striking is the longing for the (social/ist?) utopia visible in the architecture, the garden design of Migge and also in the gardening labour on the island. Yet, at the same time, this utopia is so down to earth, so practical and so physical. It appears to me to be a radical, even if only private fight not so much against Hitler or Nazism, but against the regime of brutal destruction and war in general. Watching the film I had an impression that although the war is almost invisible, seemingly in the margins (in both image and in commentary), being a background, not in any way the subject, its invisibility makes its presence extremely overwhelming. What the screening had left me with was the feeling that work - fundamental, human, material, in-spite-of-everything work - may have an enormous political power. And this is a very optimistic feeling."

I thought this film was quite superb. So much of interest to me. The biographical first: what a remarkable family, extraordinary characters, especially Liesel and Martin of course. And the sequence of generations. including the director as baby and child. Then the socio-history, extraordinary to think of that happening near Berlin in WWII. Your superb, sachlich commentary exactly right, understatement, a few people in uniform used to turn up, the drama of the mother-in-law and the Gauleiter in Wiesbaden (but she survives after 3 years, again understated). Your essential grounding in realism. Then the reflections on home movies and analysis of your father's skills in staging the game of boules - technical but accessible, easy for an ignoramus like me to understand. Yet in the actual film Migge is secondary, except in the intensity of your grandmother's love and devotion to the island. This of course has to do with the fact that he isn't in many of the films (the films of him from some other source?) The essential focus and 'hero' is Martin, as you want it to be. A kind of tragedy.

I went to see your film. It was very suitably screened in the new, elegant wing of the Museum of Sketches (you were there for the reception of the Interart conference 22 years ago). I sat next to Hjördis Kristenssen, a retired art historian and an expert on German, modernist architecture. We were both in awe of the film, enjoying it immensely, chatting away for half an hour afterwards. The way the two storylines intertwine – your grandfather's and your grandmother's with their separate visions – and the subtle analysis of the home movies – I know a thing or two about that as well having published a big book on the subject some 10 years ago. But I have not really encountered anything as intricate as this. Needless to say, your grandfather was a great architect and your grandmother quite a visionary. And your father, as you rightly a claim, something of a film director! It does resemble, to a small extent, my own grandmother's life. She built her summer paradise by a lake in the 1930s where my family spent their summers in a huge garden not entirely dissimilar (I have still got that place, although the gardens are since long gone). So I thank you for this and congratulate you on a truly great work!

Director’s Bio Thomas Elsaesser is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Media & Culture at the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012 he was Visiting Professor at Yale University, and since 2013 teaches part-time at Columbia University, New York. He is the grandson of the renowned German architect Martin Elsaesser, one of the subjects of The Sun Island. He is also the co-editor of Martin Elsaesser – Schriften (Niggli, 2014) and of Martin Elsaesser und das Neue Frankfurt (Wasmuth, 2009).