documentaries<\/a> for German television and made a handful of experimental shorts. She had never tried a nature doc.<\/p>\n\n\tShe made this one alone. A second crew member was budgeted and dropped almost immediately, because the animals on Schwarztonnensand \u2014 deer, foxes, dozens of species of nesting birds \u2014 have next to no experience of humans. \u201cThey were so unbelievably shy that sometimes I needed days, even though I could see and hear them the whole time, just to get close. But that\u2019s exactly what it\u2019s about. They live there, that\u2019s their home. When you\u2019re there, you\u2019re a bit of a guest.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tShe went back over three years, in stretches of a few days to a few weeks, through every season. She carried a Blackmagic URSA Cine with Canon photo lenses, a tripod, a stripped-back set of batteries and a stereo sound rig.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThere is no jetty, so you anchor offshore, get into the water and carry everything in,\u201d says Steinbach about her trips to Schwarztonnensand. She slept in a wooden hut on stilts at the island\u2019s highest point \u2014 a small bed, a stove for winter, and a lot of mice. Once or twice a year the highest tides put the whole island under water.<\/p>\n
\n\tOne of those tides came in while Steinbach was at the far end of the island shooting a sunset. \u201cI ended up having to sit it out in a tree for a few hours,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd when the water had gone down a bit I waded back through it, hip-deep. All these dead mice floating by.\u201d But the sunset made it into the finished film.<\/p>\n
\n\tMost of the work, she says, was waiting. She would sit in a camouflage suit in the reeds and \u2026 wait. \u201cThen nothing happens for eight hours. Or for two days.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe patience shows on screen. Strange Neighbors runs 80 minutes and is built from long, static takes: tidal forest going under twice a day and coming back up, deer picking through high grass, hornets working on a nest, ice at the waterline in January, flocks of native birds in slow flight. Then, every few minutes, a ship the size of a city block slides through the back of the frame. The contrast is incongruous and striking.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Strange Neighbors\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival<\/p>\n
\n\tSteinbach initally wrote a commentary script to accompany the images, but cut it after a filmmaker friend said the voiceover pulled them out of the movie. \u201cShe said, \u2018I keep asking myself, why is this human being here, talking about the animals?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tInstead of a conventional nature doc, with Strange Neighbors Steinbach has made something much odder. The constant contrast between pristine nature and industrial machinery is accompanied by a discordant synth-heavy score by composer Robert Nacken, that, at times, pushes the film along and, at others, deliberately drags against it. \u201cIt brings the edit forward, or runs against it, or tips the mood,\u201d Steinbach says. \u201cWe spent a lot of time working on arcs like that.\u201d Her own field recordings \u2014 wind, water, birds, distant engines \u2014 run through the 5.1 mix.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe film keeps cutting from the reserve to the port: ships at close range, gantry cranes, carriers shuttling containers across a terminal. Steinbach thinks audiences look at both with the same mix of wonder and dread.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Strange Neighbors\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWith nature we say natural forces \u2014 you\u2019re a bit afraid of it, but there\u2019s also this enormous fascination,\u201d she says. \u201cWith the machines it\u2019s reversed. First comes the fascination, but we can\u2019t really deny that we also have this fear of the huge cranes, the ships, the containers, all that steel. Something that, like nature, is basically hostile to human beings. We don\u2019t belong to that either.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mi Steinbach was on holiday in northern Germany, poking around the small harbors around where the Elbe empties…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":850584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[10167,88,2091,206,351009,351010],"class_list":["post-850583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-documentaries","tag-entertainment","tag-international","tag-movies","tag-oldenburg-2026","tag-oldenburg-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/850584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}