Heimat is a series of films written and directed by Edgar Reitz about life in Germany from the 1840s to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland-Palatinate.

[1][page needed][2] Usage has come to include that of an ironic reference to the film genre known as Heimatfilm which was popular in Germany in the 1950s.

Aesthetically, the series is notable for the frequent switching between colour and black-and-white film to convey different emotional states.

In Geschichten aus den Hunsrückdörfern (English: Tales from the Hunsrück Villages) he showed people who had not left the region, unlike Heimat's theme of leaving home.

Berkeley film and media professor Anton Kaes argued that auteur film-maker Reitz's trilogy was autobiographical.

[4]: 164  Like Hermann Simon in the 1950s, Reitz left rural life for the world of German urban avant-garde arts and intelligentsia.

He and his lover Clarissa restored a house overlooking the Rhine that lay in ruins, eventually composing music for representing and celebrating his relationship to Heimat.

After watching Holocaust, Reitz was offended by the American 'melodramaticisation' of the tragic events and the positive reception the film received.

Later in the year, Reitz contacted Peter F. Steinbach [de] and together after what was planned to be a single night, they stayed for the next thirteen months in a small hut in Woppenroth writing a script.

While shooting, the villagers became heavily involved in the project and helped with re-modelling or set changes depending on the time period.

While making Heimat, Reitz had become interested in developing a series of love stories with the working title of Men and Women.

[citation needed] Heimat, the original series, premiered in 1984 and follows the life of Maria Simon, a woman living in the fictional village of Schabbach.

Subtitled Eine Deutsche Chronik — A German Chronicle, it consists of 11 episodes running in total to 15 hours 24 minutes of screen time.

It is set during the socially turbulent years of the 1960s and depicts how Maria's youngest son Hermann leaves his rural home and makes a new life for himself as a composer in Munich.

Hermann is a musical prodigy whose teenage romance in 1955 with 26-year-old soul-mate Klärchen was considered scandalous by his conservative home village.

Hermann joins the avant-garde culture surrounding the conservatory, which includes film students, while he also takes odd jobs.

Hermann and his friends are gradually drawn to the Foxhole, a mansion headed by a wealthy art patroness said to be a "collector of artists".

The film takes place between 1840 and 1844 and centres around two brothers, their families and love relations from the Hunsrück area and their decision whether to flee hunger and poverty by emigrating to Brazil.

In order to shape the film into eleven episodes, Reitz devised introductory segments in which Kurt Wagner as Glasisch narrated the brief story so far, over photographs by Eduard Simon.

[citation needed] Die Zweite Heimat premiered at the Venice Biennale and broadcast rights were purchased by television companies in 16 different countries.

[citation needed] In Italy the film was shown at a large venue in Rome, that had sold out tickets weekly.

[citation needed] However, critic Leonie Naughton accused the film of presenting a "bourgeois history of the Third Reich, a homespun tale of innocence.

National press coverage was limited to a single review by Stephen Holden in The New York Times, who described Hermann Simon as "a hotheaded romantic" and the film as a "alternately gripping and lyrical 13-episode serial about German life in the 1960s".

'[18][17]Heimat 's themes of decadent American values and Western corporate greed rising up against the innocent simplicity of the Hunsrück have been seen as "resurrecting a discourse that prevailed in the nineteenth century about the modernization of Germany's society and economy ... no compromises or delicate balances are possible".