What is it like to live in a region that is covered in meters of snow - often well into May? Once again, filmmaker, painter and photographer Ulrike Ottinger, who was born in Constance in 1942, undertakes one of her cinematic journeys to Asia. And how China. Die Künste - Der Alltag, (1985), Taiga (1992) and Die koreanische Hochzeitstruhe (2008), Unter Schnee is also located on the border between ethnographic documentation and poetic exploration of the foreign.
Inspired by Suzuki Bokushi's encyclopaedic work “Hokuetsu Seppu” (“Snow Stories of North Etsu Province”) published in 1837, Ottinger goes to Echigo in north central Japan, looks around and records. With a light hand, she interweaves the found with the imagined, crossing documentary scenes of the everyday life of the local people with staged episodes of a traditional Kabuki play about the love between a fox spirit and a human man. The present and the past overlap all the more as keeping tradition alive and passing on legends are a natural part of everyday life in the snow country.
With Unter Schnee, Ottinger creates a mythical space in which the portrait of a contemporary landscape meets its inherent fairytale-like narratives. Lively and historical at the same time.
