Title: I am a doctor on expedition

Presenter: Moessner, Heidrun

Year: 2003
Occassion of film/tape: Premier: Documentary about Eva Reich
Location of film/tape: Bremen

Running time / reel: 76 mins /
Format: Fiilm: 16 mm and Video: VHS

(review)'There is a whole book about it', said Eva Reich about an episode in her fathers life that she herself only mentions in one sentence. Everything she talks about during this 76 minutes long documentary has been captured in books and if you have not read at least a few of them you could have problems in understanding what she is its talking about. Daughter of the sexual revolutionary, herself theorist of the sexual revolution, talks here about her life, which is inseparably linked to the fate and deeds of her Cover mighty father. She says,' He was a dictator, but in a good sense'. Such sentences, the contradictions of which she is surely aware, are par t of what makes this film documentary so thrilling.
The Bremen film director, Heidrun Moessner. has toi radically waived all explanation, which means there is 100: comment from the side or taking the spectator by is the hand and leading him through this film and this life. At first you feel a bit lost but the voice of this nearly 80 listen intently because rarely does someone talk with such exact analysis and in such a detailed and moving way, about her life. With a soft Vienna idiom that has got an( ssome American influence because Eva Reich has been living in the USA since her expulsion from Nazi Germany she tells for instance that she had already then delivered sesx education to other children on the street, explaining :o tir them where babies come from. The biggest achievement of a documentary director is to find an interesting person, gain that person's trust and place him/her in front of a camera and let him/her talk. Heidrun Moessner has done exactly this. On one occasion Eva Reich sits at her kitchen table, dressed in jeans, and looks so cool and relaxed: from this angle it expresses how at home she is in America. The director and the camera man. Henry Fried, comment from time to timeon the memories of the protagonist with curiously blurred, slow motion shots in black and white (the utter effect), that appear like dream images or free the associations. Underlying these images is the piano score Pa by the Bremen film musician Andre Feldhaus, which is like the accompaniment to a silent film. .... (Wilfried Hippen)

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Country origin: Germany

Entry number: 2945
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Entry source: Courtenay Young
Entered by: Courtenay Young
Entry date: 24 September 2004

Key Phrases: Wilhelm Reich - Eva Reich
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