Open rehearsal: „Land”

A small farm in Bavaria in 1815. An inexplicable cold snap destroys the harvest. Nobody realises that the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted a short while ago. A gigantic cloud of ash has spread around the world and is disrupting the global climate. All across Europe, summer fails to arrive. For two years, almost nothing grows in the fields.

150 years later, and Bavaria is the promised land of agriculture and animal husbandry. It is now possible to live the good life on the same patch of land as a shrewd big farmer, supported by subsidies and artificial fertilisers, and under the protective umbrella of American nuclear missiles – while the younger generation of post-war children enter into opposition politics. The “limits to growth” seem infinitely far away to both sides.

Finally, in 2025, a young chemist from Munich takes over the formerly prosperous but now run-down agribusiness. She wants to synthesise food in the laboratory using the very latest technologies. At last, it looks like capitalism and sustainability will be reconciled.

From an artistic and activist perspective, director Christoph Frick and writer Lothar Kittstein have already intensively engaged with climate change and possible scenarios for sustainable coexistence. Now they look at the centuries-old history of farming and those who till the land to fill the supermarket shelves. A farmyard in Bavaria is the setting for three snapshots in time of our human dependence on nature. “Land” tells the story of our attempts to subdue her for our survival.