(Süddeutsche Zeitung 25.10.2011)

Lust, Pain and Passion

Between Passion Play and eroticism: the carrier of actress Marina Anna Eich.

It sounded like wood in a chopper. A short sharp crack. But it were fingers, that had come into the rotor blades of a lawn mower by accident, this summer. Marina Anna Eich takes the brown bandage off her right middle finger: the first phalanx is missing, ring- and forefinger could be saved in the hospital in Murnau. She has beautiful, delicate hands. Eich plucks a bit at her bandage and says: “That’s a part of me now.” The one which isn’t there any more.

Two weeks after her severe accident she went to Cannes all the same, to the German reception at the Film Festival. She wore 3 thick white bandages then and had to tell what happened at home, on the meadow of her old farmer’s mansion near the Ammerlake. They called Marina Anna Eich “The finger” then.

Nude pictures – some ravishingly beautiful, others disturbing.

She doesn’t get as much attention in the film scene usually. Although the 33 year old actress acted in more than a dozen films. She is furthermore producer of the small film production wtp international  under the rebel director Roland Reber, is PR Manager of Reber and also took over the DVD production and marketing of the Label. She could be seen as a model in the Bravo, also twice  in the Penthouse she says and sweeps over her i-phone with her fingers. With a spread of fingers photographs appear, nude pictures. Some  ravishingly beautiful, others disturbing. Marina naked as a witch with hat; lustfully she rides on a broom. The Eich as incarnated lust; the head of a doll rest between her opened legs. Pornography? “What is pornography to be?” she says “It’s sexuality, eroticism, nudity – something natural”. Also her films are related to it. To lust, passion and pain. 

“The truth of lie” is the new movie with Marina Anna Eich, which is once again from the no-budget-production of Roland Reber. An author  (Christoph Baumann) keeps two women – Marina Anna Eich and Julia Jaschke - imprisoned in a labyrinth. He tortures them in a bizarre way, trying to drive them into any borderline experience. 

The Movie has its premiere on October 28^th  at the Hof Film Festival which will open this Tuesday. And it apparently gets in a line with Reber’s film world which transports a symbolism reminding of a Hindu temple full of incense. “It is a tough film” says Marina Anna Eich and sweeps a strand of  blonde hair behind her ear. “Merciless and full of symbolism”. Saying so her shining blue eyes look as if she was talking of a flower field in Oberammergau. 

She grew up there, in the middle of the mountains. Her father still owns a wood carver’s shop there, the next house was one and a half kilometers away. As a girl Marina participated at the Oberammergau Passion Play. A Life, “a dream for every child” she says. Later she discovers her passion for dancing. Her ballet teacher in Oberammergau tells her about a distant city, Leipzig, where she would learn how to dance properly. The 15 year old Marina went there. And danced. And suffered. Because the teacher talked down the girl of  Bavaria. She had “ Kraut masher legs”. Marina put her finger down her throat. And soon weight no more than 48 kilos. At some point she made it to leave. She had graduated at the middle school besides, went to Frankfurt to the academy of music and performing arts. And danced. But it simply shouldn’t happen. She was struggled by back pain evermore. The orthopedist said if she wouldn’t stop dancing she would end up in a wheel chair by the age of thirty. The dream was over! Marina went back home. Moved along her way. “Everything works, if you only want to”, she says. “You have to believe in yourself”. She graduated at the high school in Garmisch, besides she worked as a model. She traveled the world for one year, lived in France, Canada, Ecuador with host families, improved her French, learned Spanish. And then she discovered a new passion. Film. And a man : Roland Reber. The colossus of a man, who works as a director, author and actor since the eighties had decided a few months before to declare war on the German film industry and to prove that one could survive in this shark tank without public film subsidy. The first film was “The Room”: two persons should look after an empty house for six weeks. The only constraint: they shouldn’t enter one specific room. For that Movie Roland Reber, Mira Gittner, Marcus Grüsser and Marina Anna Eich where awarded the Emerging Filmmaker Award  2001 in Hollywood, the Best Foreign Movie in Chicago, the best Movie in Thessaloniki and others. “The film industry said: you just were lucky” Eich says today. But the team remained persistent. And Reber produced with his mini crew, who not only acted in front of the camera but also shot and made the editing, in a row “Pentamagica” (2003), “The Dark Side of our Inner Space” (2004) and then in 2005 “24/7 The Passion of Life”. “My favorite movie” says Eich. She plays the role of the naïve hotelier’s daughter Eve, who meets the Dominatrix “Lady Maria” (Mira Gittner) one day. And she immerses into a parallel world, populated by slaves, humans turned into pigs, sadists and masochists. “We were skating on very thin ice” says Eich. Several months the team did research in swinger’s clubs, in the S&M scene. “We simply had no idea”. Gittner stood in a studio as a guest dominatrix, the shootings were made in a club in Munich during the ongoing daily business. All over Germany “24/7” was screened in small but also big cinemas. Every year on July 24^th   the movie is screened not only in swinger’s clubs, in Munich it was shown at the Museum-Lichtspiele this summer. ARTE will broadcast the erotic drama on November 10^th in the night; it was also screened at the Five Lake Filmfestival in Starnberg 2 years ago. There were fervid discussion between Roland Reber and the audience not only there. Porn, flat, awkward clichés said one side. Others were fascinated.

In any case: it provokes. The sex scenes aren’t fake, even if during the shooting they are “absolutely unerotic and just exhausting”. Eich sticks by her work: “I have also a bit of an exhibitionistic inclination.” But what does it mean: it only means to present oneself  “As long as I can still do this…”

She continued. 2009 Eich performed in Reber’s movie “Angels with dirty wings”, along with Antje Mönning , who became known as TV-nun Jenny in the ARD series “Um Himmels Willen”. BILD scented a scandal: ”The TV-star shot a sex film” the paper wrote- and “ Sex-nun lives in a commune with director”. In fact Antje Mönning, Mira Gittner and Marina Anna Eich live together with Reber in the country side. “We are like a family”, says Eich.

Somehow the young woman reached herself. “One shouldn’t let others lead oneself astray from the own path” she says thoughtfully. She is a Jury member at international Film Festivals, she acquired much respect. In November she flies to Goa, to present the new work, with herself playing the main part, at the Film Festival. Marina Anna Eich performs a confident, self-assured woman. A challenge: 

she is more of the “hysteric, jittery kind”. Although she turned more calm since the accident with the mower. She is satisfied with her life today - “and grateful”. One thing is very important to her, she says this sentence several times: be yourself.

"... a different side of the beautiful Marina Anna Eich!"

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in german language

„There is more to German actor Marina Anna Eich than a photogenic face. She is a classical ballet dancer, a linguist...Marina Anna Eich’s acting talent is matched by her proficiency in marketing films...The party girl in The Dark Side of our Inner Space might appear bubbly in the initial scenes but Eich’s performance takes on a new dimension when she unwittingly starts playing with the lives of the other characters...“
Hindustan Times, 12^th of November 2003, Pratik Ghosh