Hinweis: Der folgende Text ist auf Englisch, weil für signandsight.com geschrieben.

A true documentary film is a somewhat tautological affair: what you see is what you see, the way it is shown. Therein lies in the best of cases not a deficiency but a documentary's richness. It is and becomes and remains a matter, quite simply, of being there, with all the complexities this expression offers. And as this is, after all, a matter of showing not telling, it can and should go without much saying.

Thomas Arslan's documentary "Aus der Ferne" is a marvelous one, as it gives something to see by offering directions to the viewer's gaze without ever giving prescriptions. What the camera registers, "Aus der Ferne", from afar and also so close, is given to us in order to be seen.

Thomas Arslan belongs to a bunch of German directors - Angela Schanelec and Christian Petzold among them -, who have been grouped by critics under the label "Berlin school". What they have in common is an unusual level of aesthetic reflexion. It makes itself felt - as an absence of cliché and stupidity - in every single frame of this film that begins in Istanbul and moves to Turkey's most eastern parts.

There is a signature image that turns up repeatedly, at every important step of this journey. It is a shot out of rooms with (sometimes not much of) a view. What is given in these shots is an open window and a view, but also the window's frame that is necessary for the "there" to come into cinematic being. A true documentary is a window to the world that never forgets that there is no picture without a frame and a framing device. The director's voice adds to these signature images by giving just the facts of the place and the narrator's position.

Thomas Arslan was born in Turkey and went to elementary school in Istanbul. He came to Germany when his father left the country - to which Arslan had not returned for twenty years. That much we learn about him. Turkey is the country of his childhood and this might explain why he prefers to show children in this film. Children immersed in play and action, but also children at work and children reacting playfully to the camera's presence, thereby always making the camera's absence felt, the absence of that which makes you see what is there.

Arslan's camera does not move much. It follows and presents the movement to the East by filming the roads traveled on this journey. And a few times it opens places and spaces in wonderful pans, giving a sense not simply of an openness to the "being there" of the world, but also of a documentary's power of making it visible - within the limits, of course, of the tautologically possible.