Biography
Bernhard Sallmann was born in Linz, Austria, in 1967 and grew up in Ansfelden. After graduating from high school (Abitur) and doing his civilian service, he began studying journalism, communication studies and German language and literature in Salzburg; in 1988 he moved to Berlin, where he studied media studies at the Free Univerity. After graduating in 1997, with a thesis on the filmmaker couple Straub-Huillet, he began studying film and television directing at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film 'Konrad Wolf' in Potsdam-Babelsberg (today: Filmuniversität Babelsberg).
Already in the film works he realized during his studies, Sallmann frequently dealt with different facets of his adopted hometown Berlin and the surrounding area of Brandenburg, especially Lusatia. In "Deutsche Dienststelle" (1999) he portrayed an authority that administers Wehrmacht files. His feature-length debut "Berlin Neukölln" (2001), about the Berlin district of the same name, was broadcasted on ZDF in their series "Das kleine Fernsehspiel". He called the 61-minute "400 km Brandenburg" (2002) a "winter hiking film in a circular motion"; at the Sehsüchte International Student Film Festival, the film received the Samsung Innovation Award. The 24-minute "Die Freiheit der Bäume" was a "meditation" on the English landscape garden created by Prince Pückler in Bad Muskau in the Lausitz region of Germany.
Sallmann graduated from the HFF in 2004 with "Die Lausitz 20x90," a "metric landscape film about a post-mining landscape in 20 static shots." The film ran in the German Competition of the DOK Leipzig Festival in 2005 and, after " Die Freiheit der Bäume", formed the middle part of a "Lusatia Trilogy," which Sallmann concluded with "Träume der Lausitz" ("Dreams of Lusatia", 2009). For this film, he received the DEFA Foundation's sponsorship award in 2010.
In the following years, Sallmann continued to make very idiosyncratic films between poetic film essay and observational documentary. On the occasion of an exhibition of his work at the German Historical Museum in 2023, journalist Lukas Foerster described the aesthetics of Sallmann's works as characterized by "patient, often rigid, precisely composed shots, from which, in particular, a fabulous sense for the expressiveness of landscapes speaks."
"Das schlechte Feld" (2011), in which Sallmann embarks on a search for clues in his hometown of Ansfelden, won the BLM Film Prize for Best German-Language Film at the Munich DOK.fest. This was followed by the medium-length "Die Welt für sich und die Welt für mich" (2013), a cinematic exploration of August Strindberg, and the feature-length "Fastentuch 1472" (2015), in which he interprets the late medieval Great Lenten Cloth of Zittau on film.
Sallmann's four films about Theodor Fontane's wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg region received greater attention: "Oderland. Fontane" (2016), "Rhinland. Fontane" (2017), "Spreeland. Fontane" (2018) and "Havelland. Fontane" (2019). In these, he combined historical travel texts by Fontane with long shots of contemporary landscapes.
In 2021 he shot the one-minute "Greifenhagener Strasse 32, Berlin 7.4.2021", about the question "What happens in front of a closed cinema?". That same year, "Über Deutschland", an essayistic documentary based on Marina Tsvetaeva's text of the same name, premiered at the Crossing Europe festival in Linz.
Also at Crossing Europe, Sallmann presented the documentary "Berlin JWD" in April 2022, exploring the area between Berlin's Ringbahn and the city limits. It was released in cinemas in January 2023.