Arena — Season 1, Episode 449: Edgar Reitz: Return to Heimat
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
An Arena special which documents the making of Reitz's second great German epic, The Second Heimat, which begins on BBC2 next Saturday. When Jewish writer Carole Angier watched the original Heimat (recently repeated on BBC2), she was so moved she wrote to its creator; Reitz responded that she had understood his work better than anyone. She later saw the making of his next epic, the 26-hour Second Heimat. Tonight's programme is a record of Angier's extraordinary experiences witnessing two years of writing and four years of filming.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.