German writer-director Edgar Reitz has long enthralled Teutonic audiences with his cycle of "Heimat" TV miniseries, minutely chronicling the lives and times of a Prussian-descended family in the fictitious town of Schabbach, mostly through a tumultuous 20th century. In this 2013 prequel, however, the focus shifts to the Simon family ancestors, in a harsh agrarian community in the 1840s. Central character in the ensemble cast is Jakob Simon (Jan Dieter Schneider), the younger son (of many children who perished to disease) in the household of the village blacksmith. Dreading his farm and anvil chores and fascinated by mass-migration of fellow Prussians tempted to try their luck colonies faraway Brazil, Jakob defies his father to read travel books and even tutors himself in several languages—including those of the South American Indians—in preparation for the day he himself will flee the hated Schabbach for a tropics free of ice, snow and domineering nobility. But entanglements of clan, romance and politics continue to conspire to keep Jakob from realizing his dream of leaving, while the destiny of the Simons takes shape. Reitz films in black-and-white with occasional insinuations of color into the image, and there is something almost anthropological in the details of his epic portrait of a stern existence from bygone days—a milieu not without joy, but one in which an elder perishing whilst toiling away at a workbench is nothing unusual. Werner Herzog cameos as revered scholar Alexander von Humboldt. The miniseries (which Corinth managed to fit on a single disk) belongs in any collection which includes others from the "Heimat" saga, of course, though general foreign-language shelves—especially those with a German flavor—should be open to this prelude to Reitz' career-defining achievement. Highly recommended. (C. Cassady)
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