Wildboden

1936, Frauenkirch, in the middle of the Swiss Alps, not far from Davos: surrounded by majestic mountains and tight-lipped countryfolk, Erna Schilling and the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner live in the house they call Wildboden. The political situation in Germany casts a darkening shadow over their lives, something that weighs particularly heavily on Erna. And then there are her partner's struggles with his own demons and his morphine addiction. Erna does her best to hold their shared life together, but she cannot avert Kirchner’s tragic demise. After the death of the man who had been at the centre of her life for so long, she has to radically rethink her life and fight for her own future and security.

Uniquely weaving together past and present, Constantin Lieb makes place – the house and the social and natural environment in which it is embedded – into a kind of third protagonist. The author brings these filmic scenes of a life into focus, luminous and dripping with colour. With empathy and finesse, he turns his lens away from the more famous painter and onto Erna, conveying an image of a committed but complicated partnership, and of the process of empowerment that begins in the wake of loss and grief.