On September 3, 1999, Heinrich Sabl began working on “memory Hotel”. What he didn’t know: He would be working on the project for 25 years.”Memory Hotel” is more than just a film. It is a utopia that has been lived for more than two decades, a homage to the analogue stop-motion film and a contemporary witness to the death of the copy works – driven by heinrich Sabl’s need to tell about his own life experiences and the biographies of those around him.Heinrich Sabl is a strong voice in independent cinema. The director,who was born not far from Görlitz in 1961,became known for short films such as the mini-homage “100 years of cinema(1995), but also disturbing puppet theater like “Father ubu(1997) and “Mother Ubu” (1998) about a power-obsessed and killing couple. Sabl’s films are always intended for adults. So is “Memory Hotel” (Theatrical release: October 30,2025). The 25-year-long mammoth project is about five-year-old Sophie, who loses her parents and her memories while fleeing the advancing Red Army in May 1945. She grows up in a military microcosm in an abandoned hotel where Soviets have settled, a Nazi officer (named Scharf) and a Hitler Youth (Beckmann) who is hiding in the air raid shelter.Sophie lives in the kitchen in the basement of the hotel and from now on prepares food for the Soviets.

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Heinrich Sabl, who grew up in a workers’ settlement in the GDR, wrote down his impressions – never one-to-one, but nevertheless biographically inspired. At school he heard sayings like “learning from the Soviet Union means learning to win,” but other than that he didn’t hear anything about the Russians. Thru a friend he experienced a completely different reality. “She took me to Jüterbog to a place called ‘old camp’.” There were houses on the right and left of the street,and there was a military airport for the Soviet Army near the town. “I found it so unbelievable that we both grew up in the same country. But she has a completely different biography than me because she lived in a Russian garrison town.” In “Memory Hotel” Sabl creates a universe of guilt and war veterans,longing,trauma and loneliness.

In 1995 the first draft of the script was finalized under the working title “Hotel 2000”. With a small team of around ten people and 500,000 D-Marks in his pocket, Heinrich Sabl began his film adventure shortly before the turn of the millennium, supported by the cultural film funding in Saxony, the cultural film funding in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Authority for Culture, Sport and Media in Hamburg (today MOIN Filmförder Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein) and the Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg (today Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg). The film was supposed to be finished after four years. But the director had expected to much of himself and his team.

Elaborate outdoor shoots with a man-sized model

During the first outdoor shoot in 2000, he transported the h

Weeks for One Second of Film

“Memory Hotel” is a hundred minutes long. For one second of film, you need 24 images. that’s the equivalent of 6,000 seconds and therefore 144,000 individual images. Sometimes he could complete 20 seconds in a day. When Sabl animated an explosion scene where glass shatters, it took two weeks.In the film, it’s less than a second. Scenes without movement were especially tedious. Wassili’s monologue took Sabl four or five weeks. “I went into this text and ‘locked myself in’. I was than Vasily for the time. There was no telephone, no appointments – just this text, Vasily and me.” At some point,it felt right.

Animating was always time-consuming. If you tried to animate too quickly, you risked making a mistake.The reduced speed could even lead to setbacks. “Setting the lights and positioning the camera correctly took one or two days per take. To avoid the risk of a lamp burning out the next day, the light bulbs on the set were not allowed to be turned off.” Sabl then animated until he found a good result: “If you change a lamp and move it just a millimeter, then everything immediately looks different!” Sometimes Sabl even spent the night in the studio.

In a race against time

The filmmaker acquired the camera for “Memory Hotel,” a Czech Cinephon camera from the 1930s and perhaps 1940s,cheaply after the fall of the Berlin Wall from the stocks of the Dresden DEFA studio for animated films. The camera, wich weighed 40 kilos, was usually held on a tripod positioned around the open backdrops. Everything was analog. “Sometimes, even when there was no money for advancement, we would put the films in the refrigerator until we could take them to the lab.” Then he might have to wait nine months after a shoot for the finished material and only then could he decide whether something had failed or was successful.”But we were usually able to see the material after about ten days of shooting.”