'Strange Neighbors', Mi Steinbach Mi Steinbach, Tabea-Floehr Mi Steinbach was on holiday in northern Germany, poking around the small harbors around where the Elbe empties into the North Sea, when she got talking to a man with a little boat. His name was Gert Dahms. He was the conservation officer for an island Steinbach had never heard of, and one almost nobody is allowed to set foot on.
“This man is a story in his own right,” Steinbach says. “He burns for conservation, he really commits himself, and that grabbed me immediately. At the beginning it was actually more about this person, and the question of why does this human being burn so much for this island?”
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The island, Schwarztonnensand, is barely there. Less than two miles long and a third of a mile wide, the islet was created from sand dredged from the river in the 1960s when the Elbe was deepened to allow container ships to travel upriver to port in Hamburg. Nobody had a use for the sand, so it was dumped in a heap. Then it was left alone.
Six decades on, it’s become a unique nature reserve, a small sliver of untouched nature lying alongside one of the Europe’s busiest shipping channels. Massive container ships pass within meters of its banks. Across the narrow lane on the opposite side there’s an Airbus factory, one of Europe’s biggest chemical works, a decommissioned nuclear plant, and acres upon acres of industrially farmed land. The chemical runoff from all the fertilizer and other effluents kills thousands of fish a year.
“It’s basically the least livable place imaginable,” says Steinbach. “You pass by and you’d think its dead. But the nature, on the island, is untouched.”
That combination — of untouched nature cheek-by-jowl with mass industry — fascinated Steinbach. Three years later, her documentary on Schwarztonnensand, Strange Neighbors, is the opening night film at the 33rd Oldenburg International Film Festival.
‘Strange Neighbors’ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival Permission took a while. It was months of phone calls to Dahms before he agreed to take her out to the island. Then proposals and presentations to the district conservation office in Stade and the waterways authority in Hamburg. “In the end everyone was so convinced by the project, and that I wasn’t doing anything that harms the environment, that I got a full shooting permit, even a drone permit.”
One visit was enough to kill the film she had planned. “It was clear to me: no, this has to be a different film,” she says. “I’m a camerawoman, and this place is visually just enormously striking.”
Steinbach, 38, came to nature filmmaking from an odd angle. She trained as a camera technician, shot reportage and news documentaries for German television and made a handful of experimental shorts. She had never tried a nature doc.
She made this one alone. A second crew member was budgeted and dropped almost immediately, because the animals on Schwarztonnensand — deer, foxes, dozens of species of nesting birds — have next to no experience of humans. “They were so unbelievably shy that sometimes I needed days, even though I could see and hear them the whole time, just to get close. But that’s exactly what it’s about. They live there, that’s their home. When you’re there, you’re a bit of a guest.”
She went back over three years, in stretches of a few days to a few weeks, through every season. She carried a Blackmagic URSA Cine with Canon photo lenses, a tripod, a stripped-back set of batteries and a stereo sound rig.
“There is no jetty, so you anchor offshore, get into the water and carry everything in,” says Steinbach about her trips to Schwarztonnensand. She slept in a wooden hut on stilts at the island’s highest point — a small bed, a stove for winter, and a lot of mice. Once or twice a year the highest tides put the whole island under water.
One of those tides came in while Steinbach was at the far end of the island shooting a sunset. “I ended up having to sit it out in a tree for a few hours,” she says. “And when the water had gone down a bit I waded back through it, hip-deep. All these dead mice floating by.” But the sunset made it into the finished film.
Most of the work, she says, was waiting. She would sit in a camouflage suit in the reeds and … wait. “Then nothing happens for eight hours. Or for two days.”
The patience shows on screen. Strange Neighbors runs 80 minutes and is built from long, static takes: tidal forest going under twice a day and coming back up, deer picking through high grass, hornets working on a nest, ice at the waterline in January, flocks of native birds in slow flight. Then, every few minutes, a ship the size of a city block slides through the back of the frame. The contrast is incongruous and striking.
‘Strange Neighbors’ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival Steinbach initally wrote a commentary script to accompany the images, but cut it after a filmmaker friend said the voiceover pulled them out of the movie. “She said, ‘I keep asking myself, why is this human being here, talking about the animals?’”
Instead of a conventional nature doc, with Strange Neighbors Steinbach has made something much odder. The constant contrast between pristine nature and industrial machinery is accompanied by a discordant synth-heavy score by composer Robert Nacken, that, at times, pushes the film along and, at others, deliberately drags against it. “It brings the edit forward, or runs against it, or tips the mood,” Steinbach says. “We spent a lot of time working on arcs like that.” Her own field recordings — wind, water, birds, distant engines — run through the 5.1 mix.
The film keeps cutting from the reserve to the port: ships at close range, gantry cranes, carriers shuttling containers across a terminal. Steinbach thinks audiences look at both with the same mix of wonder and dread.
‘Strange Neighbors’ Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival “With nature we say natural forces — you’re a bit afraid of it, but there’s also this enormous fascination,” she says. “With the machines it’s reversed. First comes the fascination, but we can’t really deny that we also have this fear of the huge cranes, the ships, the containers, all that steel. Something that, like nature, is basically hostile to human beings. We don’t belong to that either.”
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