Icarus Films And The KimStim Collection Team For The Seven-Disc DVD Release Of Six Films By Nikolaus Geyrhalter On June 12

Icarus Films will be teaming up with the KimStim Collection on June 12 for the release of the seven-disc set titled Six Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

This is a sweet deal that Icarus and KimStim have prepared for film affectionados, especially for those who enjoy the provocative film works of award-winning Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter.   Three of the films in the collection — Homo Sapiens, Our Daily Bread and Elsewhere — have been released individually on DVD by Icarus Films over the years.   

The cost of the entire collection, which includes three new films making their DVD debuts here — Over the Years and Abendland (both in German with English subtitles) and Pripyat (in Russian with English subtitles) — has an SRP that is less than the original purchase price of Homo Sapiens, Our Daily Bread and Elsewhere combined.

And, as a bonus, if you already have Our Daily Bread in your home entertainment library, you get an upgrade to Blu-ray with the Six Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter collection.

Geyrhalter’s films are different, and that is an understatement.   Unlike many documentary filmmakers, he does not recruit celebrities to do voice-over narration, instead he prefers to let the films “speak for themselves.”   Our Daily Bread, as an example, is chilling in its view of animal slaughterhouses and massive chicken breeding “factories.”   Words are simply not needed.

When the world — the industrialized world; the computer-driven world — was melting down over the Y2K hysteria, Geyrhalter took to the road (actually, “off the beaten path” roads) to film Elsewhere, which is a dozen 20-minute segments of human beings living in the remotest places on the planet who are completely oblivious to the Y2K phenomenon.   Each segment stands on its own, which means that Elsewhere is really 12 short films that can be enjoyed as an armchair travelogue (or escape) dealing with the daily lives of people unconnected to the terrors of the web.

As to the three new films being released as part of the Six Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter collection, we have Over the Years, a three-hour documentary that took Geyrhalter ten-years to film — he follows the workers of a textile mill in a remote corner of Austria that lost their jobs (income) when it closed up.   How they cope, how things both changed … and sadly, remained the same.

Abendland is an interesting look at what happens when the day-shift workers — office jobs, retail, etc. — head home and the nighttime shift takes over — clean-up, delivery, emergency services and so on.

And lastly, Pripyat is his 1999 documentary on the lives of four workers in the area left uninhabited by the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.   It’s a wasteland — a glimpse of a post-apocalyptic world gone mad.  

Bonus features include Alejandro Bachmann’s booklet titled “Space in Time” (first time translated into English) and video clips with Geyrhalter on his films.