Strange Neighbors, an art-house nature documentary with no narration, no interviews and no human protagonists will open this year’s Oldenburg Internationales Film Festival, the first time a doc has launched the German indie fest. The directorial debut of cinematographer Mi Steinbach, Strange Neighbors was shot over three years on Schwarztonnensand, an island and nature preserve on the German Elbe river, smack in the middle of one of Europe’s busiest waterways. The island, just over 2 miles long, was created in the late 1960s from sand dredged during the deepening of the Elbe shipping channel that serves the port of Hamburg, then left to…
