- The Sun Island is an essay film using home movies and interviews to document a historic love triangle among architects. Time and place: Frankfurt and Berlin between the wars (1927-1935), during WWII (1940-46) and in the present (2008-2018).
- The Sun Island documents the life and professional career of Martin Elsaesser (1884-1957), architect and chief city planner in Frankfurt (Germany) from 1925 to 1932. The controversial acquisition of the Frankfurt Central Market by the European Central Bank is the ostensible occasion to weave the building's turbulent history into Martin Elsaesser's biography, his wife Liesel's liaison with notable landscape architect Leberecht Migge (1881 -1935), and the director's own family history. The films draws on a unique collection of home movies, photographs and letters, as well as contemporary interviews in order to document and dramatize a life-changing episode in the family histories of two all but forgotten German pioneer architects: one designer of churches and markets, the other inventor of urban gardening and sustainable cities during the crucial years between the Weimar Republic and WW II.
- The Sun Island is a documentary essay film about coincidences, shattered lives and posthumous fame. It is about love and passion, friendship and heartbreak, about History and histories, about Germany between the wars, about an island near Berlin, about environmental protection, self-sufficiency and recycling - before these terms had yet been properly invented. It is about the dead that unexpectedly speak out among the living, about the reunion with a past that is not only not past, but whose existence hardly anyone suspected. And it is about the Utopian potential of ideas that have lain buried in the ground of a tiny marshland island for the past 70 years. Two occasions, nearly simultaneous in the new century, make the film timely: the European Central Bank's acquisition of the wholesale market hall in Frankfurt as the site for their new headquarters, and the entry of the environmental movement into the political mainstream in Europe. Both moves symbolize opposing visions of Europe: the technocratic elites versus the egalitarian "grassroots" movements. Together, they bring two long-forgotten actors back into public consciousness: Martin Elsaesser, architect of the Frankfurt Großmarkthalle (wholesale market hall), and Leberecht Migge, the reform-minded landscape architect and self-proclaimed "green Bolshevik", one of the "fathers" of the "green movement". These two figures of architectural Modernism were colleagues and friends, but also rivals in love between 1927 and 1935. The two men had common assignments in Frankfurt and Hamburg, and they had a love in common: Elsaesser's wife Elisabeth, who after Migge's untimely death managed his spiritual heritage and practical legacy on the Sun Island, until the end of the war and the invasion of the Red Army forced her departure. A self-experiment in sustainability, this island project, however short-lived, embodied visions of another Europe, anticipating present dilemmas, distinctly legible across the family histories of two architects.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content