The enigmatic Kayla Laird, DOP and photographer extraordinaire, and I recently returned from shooting our upcoming documentary across 8 different cities in Germany. We visited Frankfurt, Weimar, Dornberg (where we interviewed the mayor!) Gera, Halle, Berlin, and many more wonderful places connected to the Bauhaus!
Dornberg’s Mayor overlooks his town from the castle balcony below the Bauhaus Ceramics Workshop
We shot for 12 days, each day for about 12 hours. It was work from sun up to sun down, but we have never had so much fun in our life. Kayla said to me near the close of our trip “I wish we could do this forever!”
One of the more refreshing and unexpected moments of the trip came by happenstance. Late one evening after dinner at a very nice restaurant in Weimar, we found ourselves walking side by side with a German filmmaker and painter. We walked through the dark streets of the old city with hardly anyone else in sight talking about film, the art of film, the art of making moving and moving images. The gentleman, lighting a cigarette, draped in a long brown leather jacket and sporting a small shoot of bamboo through his left earlobe, said that we must let go of the old conventions our questions were focused on. “There is no ‘narrative‘ and ‘documentary‘ filmmaking. It is all narrative, it is all telling a story, the way you tell the story is up to you. You must make art.“
We know that film is something we’re called to do. It’s something we can’t live without. I don’t spend a happy day on this earth without creating something, and filmmaking is the medium which draws us with near obsessive fervor.
We are planning to continue shooting this project through 2025 and into 2026. There is no premier date at this time, but we know it’s going to keep growing until it takes over our lives like nothing else, and I can’t wait. We’re currently continuing to raise funds for the next leg of our research/shooting, so we’ll be sure to keep you up to date!
Photo by Kayla Laird
Will Schwarz 