NEW YORK, NY.- Film Forum is pleased to present the US theatrical premiere of Hartmut Bitomsky’s DUST, beginning Wednesday, December 3. It doesn’t get more basic than dust. And only a filmmaker of Bitomsky’s stature could successfully tackle a subject so seemingly uncinematic by bringing to it a rigorous intelligence and a masterful visual imagination. DUST scours industrial locales and office building interiors, paint factories, and demolition sites. It deals with dust-repellent products, the medicinal cost of dust, the history of the Dust Bowl and the aftereffects of the dust created in New York City on 9/11. The definitive film on an elusive phenomenon that is both everywhere and nowhere.

With a diameter of only a tenth of a millimeter, a speck of dust is just about perceptible to the naked eye. In associative and symphonic movements, Hartmut Bitomsky follows its path, peeling away layers of what we believe to be a well-known phenomenon. He pursues dust to the place where it settles and seeks out people who contend with it: columns of cleaners in their daily battle for cleanliness, inventors of air cleansing products, scientists who investigate the damaging consequences of the fine dust of uranium munitions from the US army’s stockpile of weapons, botanists, meteorologists, astronomers and artists… When dust particles collide, they create planets and galaxies. Without dust, there would be no cosmos; without dust, there would be no sky. There exists a particle of dust in every rain drop.

Hartmut Bitomsky is a prolific German documentary filmmaker who began working in 1970. Previously Film Forum has opened his feature-length movies REICHSAUTOBAHN (1985) and B-52 (2001), the former on the Nazis’ highway construction project and the latter on the eponymous military aircraft. His films are notable for their visual richness, their intellectual daring and their unconventional approach to subjects that less inventive artists might hesitate to embrace.

DUST (2007, 90 mins.) Written & Directed by Hartmut Bitomsky. Producer: Heino Deckert. Co-producers: Werner Schweizer, Hartmut Bitomsky. Cinematographer; Kolja Raschke. Sound: Gerhard Metz. Germany / Switzerland . In German with English subtitles. An Icarus Films Release.