Lola Randl (DIE ERFINDUNG DER LIEBE, FÜHLEN SIE SICH MANCHMAL AUSGEBRANNT UND LEER?) moved to the countryside. Like Julie Zeh, Max Moor, and more and more Berliners, she discovered the air, the light, and the quiet of the still moderate real estate prices in Brandenburg. Unlike the aforementioned people, she isn‘t looking for a family idyll in the country, but is trying out an open love and communal format. The consistent contact to the local population who are invited to the workshop-like weekends is exemplary and not self-evident. VON BLUMEN UND BIENEN mostly shows young, international hipsters as they plow up fields (with a horse!), cultivate vegetables (what did we grow here again?), and have slow food community meals (sustainable!). Someone sings, another person muses in a flower field, there‘s ambitious cooking, and everyone doesn‘t just tan themselves under the summer sun, they also bask in the awareness of their own progressiveness. Lola Randl talks about the “post-capitalist subject“ and maintains an ironic distance to her own utopia in a voice-over. It‘s super-annoyingly über-hip on the one hand and also likably open and brave on the other. In one episode Randl invites a psychotherapist to the dream estate that‘s in need of a renovation in order to process the love triangle she‘s at the center of, which doesn‘t work out so well. Unlike Max Moor‘s affable “life in the countryside“ books, the objects of (self)observation are the quirky newcomers.

Hendrike Bake

Translation: Elinor Lewy