A River Island Where Humans Are Banned: Oldenburg Festival Opens With a Wordless Nature Documentary

A documentary with no narration, no interviews and no human protagonists will open the Oldenburg International Film Festival on 16 September — the first time a documentary has held that slot in the festival's history (The Hollywood Reporter).

The film is Strange Neighbors, the directorial debut of cinematographer Mi Steinbach. It was shot over three years on Schwarztonnensand, a nature preserve on the German Elbe river where humans are banned. Steinbach made multiple visits, often staying several weeks at a time in a wooden hut built on stilts to keep it above the tides.

Schwarztonnensand is an unlikely piece of geography. Just over two miles long, the island was created in the late 1960s from sand dredged up during the deepening of the Elbe shipping channel that serves the port of Hamburg. It sits directly on the fairway line of the shipping lane — closer to it than any other land on the river — so container vessels pass within metres of its shore.

White-tailed eagles, geese, roe deer, foxes and raccoon dogs live wild on the island. Among the habitats Steinbach filmed are tidal floodplain forests, a landscape type that has largely disappeared from Europe. The soundtrack and sound design come from Robert Nacken.

What surrounds the island is another story. The region is one of the most industrialised in Europe, home to factories from Dow and Airbus. Large-scale industrial agriculture in the surrounding area produces effluents that trigger oxygen depletion and massive fish death annually. Steinbach told The Hollywood Reporter she did not set out to make a natural history film. She wanted, instead, a film that tells something about the place — and about human beings.

The production credits are modest. Strange Neighbors was produced by Earth Cut Filmproduktion and funded by Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, a regional German film foundation. It arrives at Oldenburg without a sales agent or theatrical distributor — meaning no company has yet been hired to sell the film to international buyers or to book it into cinemas. Festival premieres often serve as that first marketplace: a strong reception can attract a sales agent, which in turn can secure distribution.

Oldenburg, held annually in the north-west German city, runs 16–20 September. The festival has built its identity around independent and art-house cinema, and its opening-night slot is typically a statement of intent. Choosing a wordless documentary shot on a man-made island in a shipping lane is certainly that.

For a film with no spoken language, no celebrity subjects and no distributor attached, the opening-night berth puts Strange Neighbors in front of the festival's first and most concentrated audience of critics, programmers and buyers. What happens after that depends on how that audience responds.