A Berlinale review that highlights how Ted Fendt’s Foreign Travel uses books and Berlin streets to illuminate the transformative power of reading
Ted Fendt positions his film Foreign Travel as an exploration of how literature reshapes inner life. The film does not follow a conventional travelogue format. It charts the interior journeys that reading prompts in its characters.
The action is located in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Characters move through the neighbourhood in ways that mirror the detours they take within texts. The camera lingers on gestures and small displacements rather than on long-distance travel.
Fendt connects those interior shifts to the work of Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese. Her prose functions in the film as a compass for the protagonists’ shifts in perception, memory and belonging. The result is a film that treats books as catalysts for altered relations to place and self.
Foreign Travel frames reading as an active force that reshapes identity and redirects attention. The film assembles elliptical sequences rather than conventional exposition. Books, conversations and the urban landscape intersect throughout. The editing privileges reflection over narrative momentum.
The director stages moments in which a text alters a character’s relation to place. A line of dialogue or a found passage prompts a pause, a detour, a re-evaluation. These small shifts accumulate. They suggest that language and setting jointly author who a person becomes.
Fendt’s method resists tidy interpretation. Scenes open onto questions rather than answers. Viewers are invited to follow associative links between reading and movement through the city. The effect is cumulative and quietly persuasive.
Books function here as catalysts rather than plot devices. They trigger memory, redirect attention and create new spatial habits. The film thus stages reading as a public act that has private consequences.
Stylistically, the film relies on economy: brief exchanges, textured ambient sound and deliberate cuts. This economy reinforces the central claim that attention, redirected by language, remakes experience. The result is a film that continues to probe how literature and place co-author selfhood.
The film treats literature as an active force rather than a mere backdrop. Through scenes of quiet study, shared passages and solitary reflection, the director stages reading as a process that can change life courses.
Encountering a text in the film triggers layered responses: memory retrieval, imaginative projection and reassessment of social ties. The reading experience functions as an emotional cartography, mapping inner states that mirror Kreuzberg’s streets.
Fendt foregrounds the materiality and rhythm of reading. Books are held, pages are turned, lines are underlined. Those gestures are filmed with close attention to touch and tempo, conveying that tactile engagement can be both intimate and revealing.
The director insists that reading extends beyond intellectual appreciation into embodied practice. These small, physical acts shape mood and behavior, and they reposition characters within their social environment.
These small, physical acts shape mood and behavior, and they reposition characters within their social environment. In the film, Kreuzberg functions as more than a backdrop; it operates as an active register of memory. Streets, cafés and apartment facades register histories that the characters carry. The mise-en-scène treats these sites as lieux de mémoire, where recollection and imagination collide.
The director foregrounds quotidian details—graffiti, market stalls and tram lines—to anchor abstract reflection in concrete space. Close-ups of hands turning pages and faces reading in public link private interiority to communal terrain. This framing suggests that reading does not only interpret the city; it reconfigures how the city is perceived and inhabited. In that way, the urban landscape becomes a participant in the characters’ narrative trajectories.
The film stages everyday conversation as public intellectual exchange. Characters quote, paraphrase and respond aloud to literary passages. These exchanges shift communal spaces into settings for private reflection. In Kreuzberg, streets and squares function as stages where texts shape collective moods.
Although Foreign Travel does not depict overseas relocation, it addresses themes tied to migration. The film examines dislocation, cultural translation and efforts to sustain continuity. Characters’ attachments and their readings of Ortese provide tools for managing fragmentation and loss. Rereading appears as a form of preservation, while reinterpretation acts as an adaptive strategy.
The film links form and content through restrained cinematic techniques. Intimate close-ups, measured pacing and ambient sound foreground verbal exchange over spectacle. Texts circulate on screen and in conversation, creating a social ecology where literature influences mood and movement.
Texts circulate on screen and in conversation, creating a social ecology where literature influences mood and movement.
Director Fendt adopts a restrained visual grammar that privileges observation over dramatization. Long takes and modest camera movement invite contemplative attention. Quieter scenes allow text and gesture to carry weight. The editing often lets passages of reading breathe, underscoring how absorbed attention alters temporal experience. In this way, Foreign Travel translates the rhythm of reading into a cinematic tempo.
Sound design and score appear sparingly to support rather than overwhelm the film’s reflective atmosphere. Ambient noises—street traffic, café clatter and pages turning—are foregrounded when appropriate. Those sounds emphasize immersion in daily life rather than cinematic spectacle. The choice aligns with the film’s modest ambition: to create space for meditative witnessing rather than to reinvent formal cinema.
The film presents literature as a public practice that shapes attention and social exchange. Characters read aloud, respond and circulate texts in shared spaces. That circulation alters how scenes unfold and how bodies move through urban settings. The result is a portrait of reading as an active, communal process with measurable effects on mood and tempo.
Rather than offering spectacle, the film asks viewers to register small temporal shifts produced by focused attention. Those shifts form the film’s principal claim: that sustained engagement with texts remaps everyday experience.
Ted Fendt’s film examines how sustained attention to books alters perception in the city. It treats reading as a gradual, cumulative force rather than a single revelation. The film links careful observation of material detail with changing senses of belonging.
Through quiet pacing and repeated scenes of rereading, the work shows books as companions and catalysts. Texts on screen and in conversation trace a social ecology that changes mood, movement and memory. The result is a meditation on how language and place act together to remap interior worlds.
Rather than a conventional travel story, the film functions as an elegy to the restorative capacities of literature. It foregrounds literature’s power to help characters remember, imagine alternatives and locate themselves within a shifting cityscape. For viewers who accept its deliberate tempo, the film offers nuanced insight into the everyday mechanics of cultural and emotional orientation.