In her poetic research documentary film Hinterland, Marie Voignier portrays the leisure world of Tropical Island, Europe‘s largest indoor rainforest. This tourist mega-project comes with a beach, tropical plants and several pools as well as bars and restaurants for Germans who are eager to go on holiday but who prefer to look for exoticism in their own back yard, where there is no danger of tropical pathogens or insects lurking and spoiling the idyllic illusion. This fabricated landscape has been housed on an old air base in the eastern German provinces, 70 km away from Berlin, under the enormous metal dome of an airship hangar for the German company CargoLifter, and is one of the world’s largest self-supporting halls. What Voignier is staging here is both the poetic archaeology of a place with its own special history as well as the yearning for ›the foreign‹ and ›the other‹ in the form of a holiday paradise that simulates exoticism. With humour and irony, Hinterland highlights the normality and ordinariness of the eccentric and confronts the artificial holiday world with its specific placing in the lesser developed area of Brandenburg. In this »hinterland« live the manager of the leisure centre, the villagers and also one young man who is trying to get a job here – normal people who make a living based on the dreams of others. A study of our relationship to time, space and illusion.

Film Series Fake Space

Awards for ›Hinterland‹
Ürix des Médiathèques – FID Marseille 2009