Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

For two and a half years, the British director Sophie Fiennes followed the admired and controversial German sculptor/painter Anselm Kiefer. With angelic patience and distance, she observes Kiefer at work in Barjac, a hamlet in the South of France where he has since 1993 transformed a silk factory on a large industrial site into a mega-art-project with roads, towers, tunnels, and amphitheatre, crypt, an underground lake, and more than 40 exhibition spaces in which he puts his sculptures, paintings and installations.
With concrete mixers, digging machines, bulldozers, and with the assistance of several faithful and taciturn building labourers, Kiefer’s pièce de résistance emerges; a very miraculous haven, to which he said a final farewell soon after the documentary was completed.
Fiennes’ film is a sober, impressive introduction to the work and the approach of Kiefer. ‘Before I saw the film, I knew that Kiefer was a great artist. After seeing the film, I now know why,’ a British critic wrote.