Bio : Mike Stubbs born 1958 in Welwyn Garden City, England, United Kingdom. Lives and works in Liverpool, England, United Kingdom. Ulf Langheinrich born 1960 in Wolfen, Germany, pre-unification West Germany. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria and Accra, Ghana.
Description : The area is notorious for its astonishing lunar-like landscape, a product of uncurbed open cast mining and chemical production. Although much of the devastation belongs to a past era of massive state industry some coal mining continues using vast mechanical diggers made before the Second World War. The sounds of these industries are the basis for Langheinrich’s hypnotic electronic score while their images are reconstructed into an electrifying impression of a dislocated landscape and community. Implicit in the film is also the tension between the old and the new (post unification) East Germany. The old is industrial, monolithic, dirty, inefficient, obsolete, a wasteland; a past to be destroyed and buried. The new is fragmented, avaricious, precarious, anxious, illusive. Gift is the German word for poison.