Plateau

A man wanders through deserted outdoor spaces. He encounters no one; he appears disoriented and lost. At the same time, two women have found temporary shelter in a makeshift interior. A subtle sense of menace emanates from the deserted surroundings. Plateau tells of an alienation, an isolation that has spread from the protagonists’ inner worlds out into the external world. The architecture becomes a reflection of this.

Plateau was filmed in so-called ‘shrinking towns’ in Germany. These locations form the architectural basis for the depiction of dystopian homelessness in PLATEAU. The exterior shots were filmed in parts of the Ruhr region and in Bremerhaven, focusing on individual neighbourhoods struggling with massive vacancy rates. Some of the buildings shown in the film have already been demolished. The starting point for PLATEAU was an examination of the historical film “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” starring Harry Belafonte (USA, 1959), which is considered one of the first “end-of-the-world films”.