21. UNDER|DOX 08 – 14 OKT 2026

After “Classical Period” and “Outside Noise”, Ted Fendt keeps examining the effect of literature on our lives. In Berlin, Léonie gathers a few friends to create a book club dedicated to Anna Maria Ortese. Punctuated by the club meetings, discussions about the Italian writer’s work intertwine with ordinary events – an impending birth, a break-up, the search for a place to stay. Daily life and literature move along together, as if merged into one another, and reflect in a single movement the temporal and the sacred, the mundane and the sublime. In spite of its title, “Foreign Travel” is less a film about movement than about duration. It superimposes several temporal regimes: the suspended time of reading, the fragmented time of daily life, and the broader time of literature in relation to History. Ted Fendt’s direction stays true to what makes his work so special: his attention to the shifting of light throughout the seasons, the rumble of the city, the variations of
expressions on people’s faces as they read or think. Thus, literature remains a matter of sharing. – FID Marseille

Ted Fendt
DE 2026
63 min | German, Italian, French | 16mm