Crew

Nico Weber has been working intensively with Prora since 2015. Her film “The Ghosts of Prora. On the Reconstruction of History” (3sat 28.09.2015), aired to mark 25 years of German unity, was later broadcast under the title “Größenwahn in Beton” (Delusions of Grandeur in Concrete; 13.05.2016 ZDFinfo). Weber’s film took a bold approach to achieve a particular visual quality and complexity of content. Its focus was on German history from a German perspective, the transformation of Prora.

Since then, it has been clear that this was by no means the end of Weber’s preoccupation with Prora. In fact, she wants more: a more international and more essayistic approach, free of the shackles of ready-made TV programme slots. Moreover, Weber is well aware that the transformation of Prora is far from over, and even though media attention is growing, the complex itself has remained stuck in an exclusively classical historical view of Germany’s past.

The director’s many conversations with local people, museum makers, former NVA officers, tourists, apartment owners, investors, project developers, architects, historians, artists and psychoanalysts, and her studies of numerous books, articles and films, have generated a great deal of attention; Prora is a very special, yet strangely forgotten place. One where the strands of 20th-century German history come together – National Socialism, the rise and fall of the GDR – and entwine with the threads of modern architectural history and the history of European mass tourism. Moreover, Prora is a metaphor for the strange entanglements and connections of historical time loops with human biographies; these indirect links often surprisingly emerge even when people do not have anything to do with Prora directly at first glance.

In this sense, INSIDE PRORA is a search for such connections and is based conceptually on architecture as a medium: architecture as a channel system that directs flows, as a communicative surface inviting interaction, as a shell that one attracts, or as an infrastructural matrix whose protocols can be circumscribed.

Nico Weber (born 1967 in the northern Black Forest) is a director, author and producer – the latter with reluctance. Her choice of subjects is unconventional, her authorship clear. She works along the borderline between narrative film and other cinematic forms in search of the connection between a form and its content, in order to immerse herself in other universes.

Since studying philosophy, political science and German language and literature, she has worked on journalistic and artistic films primarily examining philosophical questions, above all the challenges of the supposedly “unfilmable”; in the process she has developed an associative and idiosyncratic film language that is permeated by a principle of radical subjectivity with an empathetic passion for her subject.

After working as a print journalist for “Die Woche” and as an editor and author for the current affairs editor at ZDF and for the programme Kulturzeit, she became a freelancer. For more than 20 years, her films for the public broadcasters in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland have been shown on ARD, ZDF, arte, 3sat, ORF and SRF and have regularly crossed borders. Today she is engaged at the interface between film and visual arts and embarks on film trips throughout Europe, Asia and the USA with her company, NOW COLLECTIVE, working with artists in her field in camera and editing. She has received several awards for her films. INSIDE PRORA is her first work for the cinema. At the moment, she is working on her next cinema project, a film about “On Poetic Doing”.