Demmin Cantos

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s latest film—the first since 1995—is an exploration in words and images of Demmin, a town close to the village where he grew up as a child. The film refers to the history of the town where one of the largest mass suicides took place at the end of the Second World War. It documents the attempts, initiated by Syberberg himself in recent decades in the form of artistic interventions on site, to reanimate the central market square as a community space. He is not concerned with restoring old conditions, but with questions of community in a place that has lost its centre.