Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Good movie but grossly overrated

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

If you don't find the scene where Jakob's mother recites the names of her deceased children moving then can I suggest you go elsewhere for your entertainment.This shows life nasty ,brutish and short.However the details of village life are so interesting,the acting so good,the writing,characterisation so real and the use of black and white with colour such an interesting device that it doesn't become a depressing film.Rather I found myself caught up in its drama.That doesn't happen very often.Just a great film and a great success in my view.I must seek out the director's other work. I don't have to show-off by telling the world who played Humboldt either!

How many unforgettable images can Edgar Reitz create? Country girls given coins, stare dumbly into their palms. A girl with a malformed leg is ostracized. Country people protest "Liberté!" to returned Prussian authorities. A stone cutter becomes mute on his way to oblivion, but first he cuts an agate slice that contains the world. Where do Reitz, and Casting Director An Dorthe Braker (Downfall, Bader-Meinhof Complex), find actors who seem to step out of a time machine? Where does Reitz get the poignancy of turns of fate changing lives utterly in a world where everything is grown, pounded, turned, and wrested from the earth, if not by yourself and your family, by others who you've known all your life? Under the comet of 1843, hawkers sell passage to paradise to people who never once left the Hunsruck. The damson berries are harvested, and youths become intoxicated on music and dancing. A Prussian lackey reads a hateful decree to an empty street. A lone rider brings more emigration papers. Neighbors and families walk beside their wagons, to Rotterdam and beyond on a journey they cannot comprehend except that there is no return. In Schabbach, the remaining Simons endure, and repair and improve the family smithy. A letter arrives from Brazil after 13 months, and is read to the astonished gathering. We are in Schabbach to witness all of this.

Home from Home; Chronicle of a vision is also called 'Die Andere Heimat'. It is the story of Jakob in a fictional village it chronicles a time when emigration was the curse of all Europe. There was a better life awaiting in the New World – and in the case of Jakob this was Brazil.It also tells the story of inter familial strife, the rifts that religion can cause and the triumph of love and intelligence over everything. It is filmed in black and white and is done so beautifully. Black and white needs much more lighting to get it to look right and this has been done here pains takingly. There is colour too but only at crucial moments to highlight the beauty of a flower or a meadow and to add simple emphasis to a scene – as done in the silent films 'Gold' and 'The Phantom of the Opera'. We span many years and this lasts a whopping 235 minutes – I watched in two sittings but it is well worth it. It has a lost world charm about it and yet still so many things to impart. Simple, stunning, evocative and very moving in places too. This is a film for real cinephiles and especially those who love European cinema.

I loved "Zweite Heimat" from Reitz before knowing he was famous or important, so I was looking forward to this film, and got a 4 hour disappointment. The "death toll" was as high as the depiction of sitcom situations, only not even mildly interesting. I never understood nor sympathize with our main character, "Jakob". A bookish dreamer, mistreated by her father, who was basically a tough brutish man, and dramatically out of place in this small town. He, J., was a born linguist and scientist but with obvious lack of "emotional intelligence" as we would put it nowadays. Even when he cries on camera, it didn't transmit anything, the emotions he has being like a child, rather like tantrums. He speaks in many tongues but seems to be unable to relate to the world around him. Take Jettchen, who says rather womanly: "You are different from ALL people around here", and gets the usual flat emotional response from him. You can't make a movie without one single likable character.Reitz made a pretentious film with a trite plot that is way too long. I wanted to leave many times during the showing at a film festival. Had it been on TV I wouldn't have endured it for more than 20 minutes, and I do love European films. Yesterday on the same I saw "Banklady" from Christian Alvart , who says on a recent interview "I want viewers to be on the edge of their seats during the whole film". Nothing of the like happened to me during this ordeal.I liked photography and music. The effect of "putting something in color for contrast" is interesting at first, but it grows annoying and a bit corny, like for instance the red cherries it highlights late in the film. If you want to know the "economic conditions" of that time in rural Europe or an anthropological view, this film may appeal to you. Otherwise skip it, you won't regret it.PS: Cameo of Werner Herzog as Von Humboldt.