Stephan Takkides

Umland is a short film that looks at the periphery of a city, combining elements of fiction with documentary. Although the film is shot around Berlin, the city's name is never mentioned. Still landscape shots are narrated by an amateur botanist who ventures out beyond the city limits in search of the first flowers of spring.

Frustrated with urban life, he heads off on three trips to explore the wilds at the end of the suburban railway. These lead him to the remnants of a sewage farm, a former landfill site and along an overgrown rail track to a vast cemetery in the city’s outskirts.