Unendlich
2016 · Germany
Directed by Oliver Scholz
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A first-person essay film in which the director reflects on growing up in East Germany, where God seemed infinitely distant and religion played no part in his small world, and on the unexpected turn toward faith that came later in life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Essay film about faith in post-Communist Germany sounds like the kind of earnest prestige project everyone applauds—but Scholz actually uses infinity as a formal constraint, not just a metaphor, which is the only thing keeping this from being unbearable.
Scholz positions personal testimony within a rigorous intellectual tradition—the essay film as philosophical form—where the abstraction of infinity becomes both structural and emotional apparatus; it's the kind of formally considered work that rewards repeated viewing and restores faith in the essay mode itself.
The real lift here is how Scholz uses silence and negative space to carry the weight of what wasn't there—no God, no religion, no noise—so when faith arrives, the *absence* becomes the most eloquent thing in the frame.