Halbe Hütte – a Documentary Film by Lecturer Andreas Geiger

What happens if something is taken from you that you consider your property?

The film tells the story of documentary filmmaker and Merz Akademie lecturer Andreas Geiger, who inherits a meadow in his Swabian hometown Donzdorf together with a hut on the edge of a forest and finds out that half of the hut is not on his property at all. The grandfather was probably 4 metres wrong 80 years ago when he built the hut. That wouldn’t be a problem if the neighbouring property, the community forest, hadn’t been bought by a businessman to make it his private hunting ground and who insists that he now owns the other half of the hut.

A legal dispute takes its course, in which it becomes more and more obvious that nobody can win and a solution can only be found in the diplomatic, on the level of moral values. But that will not happen. All social institutions, be it the building authority, the mayor, the regulars’ table or the church, do not manage to find a solution for the preservation of the hut. In the end there is a threat of demolition if there were not the director of the Kunsthalle in the district town …

The film tells how neighbourhood disputes, the most frequent form of legal dispute even in village communities, are no longer settled “among each other” as they used to be. The film also shows how communities are financially forced to sell their properties in order to preserve their infrastructure. Castles, old courtyards and common areas are privately owned, to which the population no longer has access. What is globally known as “land grabbing” also takes place on a small scale, even in an old hut.