The original plan was to continue our work as filmmakers and storytellers, independent of location and as digital nomads, after a long period of being professionally and locally embedded. Travelling the world – through the winter in warmer climes – collecting stories cinematically and textually and bringing them together into a greater whole.
Covid-19 influences being on the road and led us, together with our dog Aika, to the Finca Baobab to Anja and Charlie in mid-September 2020. A Garden of Eden, built up over fifteen years of work – with a lot of love, with professional and gardening skills – created from a barren and dry piece of land on the Costa Tropical in Andalusia, which they make available to people for a relaxing holiday. Corona is now keeping the guests away and causing existential worries.
In the Cortijo, the largest and most comfortable house on the finca – taken over by Anja and Charlie as a ruin – now stylishly renovated in southern Spanish-North African ambience – we are now settled, the winter over, with the period open to the front; our new home. Thanks to a good internet connection, a stable power supply and plenty of space, it is also a suitable place for our work.
The tranquillity, the greenery all around inspires and leaves room for creativity to spread.
During the first lockdown, over Easter, we made the short documentary film „Voice of the Evening“, which we shot in twelve days of self-isolation in a nursing home in eastern Switzerland and finished in August 2020 together with documentary film director Michelle Brun. An emotional aspect of this was that the protagonist in the film, our mother/mother-in-law, opened herself up to dying during the filming and died four days after the filming was finished. Until the end, the 95-year-old wrote a diary with a clear mind, which she left to us and thus now gives a wider audience an insight into the world of thoughts of a person at the end of his life.
The second wave of corona is sweeping the world and is also leading us to a stationary life. Due to cinema closures and cancellations of film festivals that were planned for the distribution of the film, we created here at Finca Baobab, among other projects of our company trailblazing GmbH, the online platform „kino-online.ch“, where the film can now be viewed
Compensating for the time-consuming work on the computer is the time spent together in the friendship that has developed with Anja and Charlie and the temporary help on the finca. As welcome guests, we have unlimited access to the wealth of fruit and organic vegetables on this small piece of land. Chirimoyas in abundance, avocados without end, guavas, the first oranges and mandarins, fresh bananas in various varieties, limes and lemons, pomegranates, mangos, figs, passion fruit and papaya are ripening, lemon caviar, almonds, aubergines, chillies, tomatoes, various types of cabbage, lettuce, rocket, chard, spinach, chillies, fresh kitchen herbs, our own olive oil of the finest quality..
„Be nice to strangers – they could be angels in disguise“ is the introductory and lived sentence on Anja and Charlie’s website, which we feel every day and which gives us home as digital nomads.
