Bernd Schoch

OLANDA

Germany, 2019, 154′

Olanda tells the story of mushroom pickers who, in the summer and autumn months head, to the southern Carpathians of Romania to begin their search. Far from being a leisure activity, for many of the pickers this is a main source of income which they and their families rely on to get by. The film takes a look at the coexistence of a temporary community over a whole season and uses the rhizomatic structure of the fungus itself to describe a precarious sociopolitical structure in which the smaller and the larger stories, the different motivations and circumstances of the protagonists cross paths and connect again and again.

Bernd Schoch
Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1971. From 2000 to 2007, he studied media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. From 2008 to 2016, he was an artistic assistant at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Since 2008, Bernd Schoch has been a member of the collective Dokumentarfilmwoche Hamburg (Documentary Film Week Hamburg). He lives and works as a filmmaker in Hamburg.