29 Palms, CA is a project positioned between film and art. In this project the German photo artist Stefanie Schneider, explores and documents the dreams and fantasies of a group of people living in a trailer park community in the Californian desert. An essential part of this project is the artistic, conceptual and filmic collaboration between actors, musicians, photo artists, directors, etc. For example, Udo Kier, Marc Forster, Radha Mitchell, Max Sharam. All participants are developing and acting out their characters. The vision of a feature-length film is just as important in this as all the single, small stages or fragments which are necessary for this film. The film is a biography and a social commentary, whose characters act as the alter egos of those individuals who portray them. In the course of the art project the different performers have contributed ideas, stories, scenes, monologues, poems, music and films, so that the basic principle of the concept, namely a collaboration of different perspectives and the pooling of different fragments and depictions, bestows a lively rhythm upon the film. Each character will introduce his or her character in the form of a fictional or semi-fictional diary on the website, which was specially developed for this project. The website hereby plays the role of an independent world from which the film project and a radio show (Lonely Hearts) emerge. The characters have influence on what will be seen in the film through their descriptions. The whole film is generated from animated Polaroid pictures, which Stefanie Schneider is editing into the film. The fact that the films are expired leads to the surreal distortions and colorings. The pictures appear fleeting and taut, blurry. Stefanie Schneider paints with her Polaroid films. She clearly alludes to the ambivalence between imagination and portrayal, between fiction and reality, and leaves it to the viewer to form his / her own picture, to remain in a surreal or real space. The motive of the desert also supports the dichotomy between imagination and reality, at any moment breaks the clearness of a definite ascription, which is definitely not found in her work. All the more clear it becomes that the characters are living in their own lost world.
