IT WAS A HOT AUGUST DAY as members of the Indiana University DEFA Project sat in the garden of the café Via Nova II in the Universitätstrasse of Berlin-Mitte in 2010, waiting to meet filmmaker Eduard Schreiber (born in 1939). His short experimental documentary Östliche Landschaft (Eastern Landscape, FRG), an essayistic exploration of a North-Berlin landfill, overflowing with GDR refuse and relics, had premiered in 1991 at the Leipzig Film Festival. Until the DEFA Film Library at University of Massachusetts in Amherst rediscovered the film and included it in their Wende Flicks retrospective, the late-DEFA short had been all but forgotten. After screening the film in Bloomington, Indiana, we had many questions for Schreiber, whose film Ich war ein glücklicher Mensch (I Was a Happy Person, GDR 1990) had just shown at the Kino Arsenal at Potsdamer Platz. As a guest of the DEFA Foundation’s monthly series, which showcases unusual and aesthetically important work to the Arsenal’s mixed East-West and international cinephile audience, Schreiber was, in just that moment, confronting his own Wende filmography. We hoped he could further illuminate Östliche Landschaft and his production process from twenty years earlier. Minutes later he arrived, and we sat down in front of a laptop to watch his film once together.

QUESTION: What originally attracted you to documentary filmmaking?

EDUARD SCHREIBER: I wanted to make films. That it became documentary film had to do with an offer from Karl Gass to come to the DEFA Documentary Studio. I went, and although I had wanted to make features, I never got away from documentary film.

Q: Can you tell us something about the play between fiction and reality in your films?

ES: My conception of film—and also documentary film—is characterized by the fact that films are first and foremost images. For me, text and linear structure have no place in film. All my films contain certain sequences, passages, in which something occurs that has very little to do with a documentary approach. And of course this allows the viewer room for his or her own thoughts. I have always urged, “Look, people, look! And don’t always just listen.” All that talk is something I hate unless they’re films in which I hold conversations.