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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
The first time the screen burns white, you think the projector stuttered. It hasn’t. That flash is decades of glare off baked Karoo quartz, a memory-photon hurled by a man who can’t afford nostalgia.
Das Geheimnis der Lüfte—literally “the secret of the skies”—is less a title than a taunt. There are no dogfights, no Zeppelins drifting like rotund whales. The heavens here are parchment-thin, inked with invoices that flutter down like judgement. Director Julius Brandt, shooting on grain-warm 16 mm, distills an entire entrepreneurial odyssey into glances, glitches, and the hush between keystrokes.
We open on a child’s hand brushing the spines of sun-blistered encyclopedias. Cut to present-day Cologne: the same hand, now scarred, slots a server rack into place. No dialogue—only the pneumatic sigh of rails. In that single match-cut, Brandt collapses a century of colonial migration, the death of print, and the birth of a digital archive. It’s the boldest ellipsis I’ve seen since Glacier National Park let silence speak for melting ice.
Eva Roth plays the adult “archivist,” a slippery role: part witness, part saboteur. Her pupils reflect CRT phosphors as she tells the fledgling tycoon, “Servers fail faster than hearts.” The line lands like prophecy; every subsequent scene vibrates with the dread of bit-rot.
The screenplay, rumored to be culled from actual logs and deleted emails, follows a cascading syllabus of misfortune: eviction from a corrugated-iron library; a partner who vanishes with the only hard drive; a lightning strike that fries the RAID array during a thunderstorm that smells of petrichor and copper. Each setback is filmed like a sacrament—slow zooms, ambient choir, the drip of groundwater onto motherboards.
Brandt’s gambit is to prove that knowledge isn’t power; it’s a liability you insure with sleepless nights. When the protagonist—credited only as “Der Bibliothekar”—finally registers the domain TheBook.co.za, the camera tilts up to a sky the color of dead LCDs. Triumph feels indistinguishable from surrender.
Karl Waldschütz, usually a burly presence in Der Eid des Stephan Huller, here whittles himself down to a stoic wick. His cheekbones carry the weight of defaulted loans; a single tear at minute 93 is the closest the film comes to a special effect. Roth counters with mercurial stillness—she listens like someone already composing footnotes.
Supporting players drift in like marginalia: Karl Illner as a cartographer who can’t find his own house keys; Max Ralph-Ostermann as a coder who sleeps in a hammock slung between server cabinets. None are granted backstories; they’re footnote humans, and that sting of insignificance is the point.
DoP Tilda Kovac shoots dawn on the Rhine through a cracked smartphone lens, gifting the water a bruised lavender hue. Later, inside an abandoned observatory, starlight drips onto corroded machinery like celestial WD-40. The palette—ochre, bruise-blue, carcinogenic green—renders technology as archaeological relic, a choice that rhymes with The Redemption of White Hawk’s treatment of myth.
Grain is intentionally heavy; at times the image threatens to dissolve into static, mirroring the protagonist’s terror of data entropy. When HDR flare does intrude—sunlight refracted through a dusty CRT—it feels like a moral affront, too vivid for a world that survives on dimness.
Editor Mischa Lenz eschews conventional montage. Instead, he “scrapes” scenes, letting them fray like over-handled parchment. A legal hearing collapses into a single close-up of a gavel’s dent; a childhood memory intrudes as a 4-frame subliminal. The effect is temporal vertigo: you feel years slide off the reel. Compare that to the tableau stasis of From the Manger to the Cross; here, holiness is replaced by the sanctity of metadata.
No score in the traditional sense. Instead, we get the infrasonic growl of hard drives, the Morse-code tinkle of cooling pipes, the faint Afrikaans lullaby leaking from a caretaker’s radio. These elements braid into a tension that conventional strings could never achieve. When total silence finally drops—during the site’s inaugural crash—you become hyper-aware of your own breath, as if you too might corrupt the data.
At its core, the film asks: what lasts longer, paper or pixel? The protagonist’s father once burned his personal library to stay warm during a Boer-War winter; decades later, a ransomware attack does the spiritual equivalent. History isn’t linear—it’s a palimpsest that rewrites you while you watch. Brandt refrains from techno-phobia; he’s more concerned with ownership. Who possesses the cloud? The one who pays the invoice or the one who remembers the password?
Gendered labor flickers at the edges. Roth’s archivist repeatedly salvages what men obliterate, yet her name never appears on the masthead. The film quietly links archival erasure to romantic erasure: love letters trapped in spam folders, anniversary reminders swallowed by calendar bugs. It’s a quiet echo of suffragette struggles in What 80 Million Women Want, updated for the cloud era.
Critics will invoke The Student of Prague for its doppelgänger dread, or Pilgrim’s Progress for its allegorical trudge. More apt is the structural DNA of Saved in Mid-Air: both hinge on rescue operations that can’t save the rescuer. Yet Brandt’s film is colder, more Lutheran; grace arrives as a progress bar, not a dove.
Unlike the kinetic fisticuffs of The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, the tension here is durational—will the site load before the soul unloads? It’s boxing with timecards.
Just when venture capital blooms, Der Bibliothekar deletes himself: no farewell blog, no crypto-wallet will. Roth’s final shot—framed through a cracked server-room glass—shows her watching the 404 page flicker into a mirror. The domain stays live, orphaned yet functional, like a library with all the lights on and no librarian. The movie refuses catharsis; instead it offers continuity. The next morning, somewhere in Bloemfontein, a schoolkid will still download a royalty-free folktale, unaware of the sacrifice encoded in its pixels.
Das Geheimnis der Lüfte will frustrate viewers who crave the narrative handrails of Oliver Twist or the devotional certainties of Life and Passion of Christ. It’s a film that happens between the subtitles, in the whir of your own laptop as you watch. Yet its emotional payload is devastating: every digital comfort we take for granted is stapled to someone’s slow erasure.
See it on the biggest small screen you can find—laptop only, no phones—then walk to the nearest library and listen to the pages breathe. You’ll realize Brandt hasn’t made a film; he’s crafted a living footnote, forever asking to be updated.
Rating: 9.4/10 – An essential lament for the information age, as luminous and corrosive as server LEDs in a midnight rack.
IMDb —
1921
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